4. Surveil Ordinary Citizens
An Ongoing Chronicle of The End of America by Naomi Wolf and what has happened since:
This chapter feels impossible to quantify completely. The level of surveillance in the US has only increased since 2001, and right now it feels pretty much all-encompassing. I literally started this post a month ago, but every time I would try to finish it I would get super overwhelmed.
Honestly, the chapter itself felt kind of quaint. This book was published years before the Snowden revelation. Our privacy has been whittled away to almost nothing, anymore. It was bad, then. But in looking back from where we are today, it was only the beginning. And as someone who championed the notion of "Let big brother look! I'm not hiding anything! They don't care about my little life!" for so embarrassingly long... it's incredibly overwhelming to take it all in, now.
So, rather than detail specifics of who did what since Bush, I think it's fair to say that no one, not Obama, Biden, or obviously Trump, has done enough to repair privacy in our country. I'll sum it up in broad swaths. I'm not proud of this post, to be honest. But I have to get through it to get to the next chapter and work more on this project. Trump and his band of supremacists aren't everything there is to know about fascism in the US. I'm sure that I'll have to return to this chapter and do better research. For now, broad strokes are better than no strokes.
I actually think that once I finish my research about the time since Bush, I'll go back over each chapter to reference the time before Bush.
Chapter Summary
Wolf talks about how the Bush administration unleashed a new era of mass surveillance upon the country. She does acknowledge that counter intelligence programs were used against activists in the Civil Rights era. But she talks about the tracking of phone calls and emails, bank transaction monitoring, and the use of everyday citizens to report "suspicious" activity. Making the masses spies against themselves is a very dystopian approach to surveillance.
What's Happened Since
Boy, where to start? Snowden worked briefly for the Booz Allen Hamilton as a contractor under the National Security Agency before he revealed thousands of documents to several journalists. These documents detailed global surveillance programs including cooperation between telecommunications companies and several governments. There's far more to it, but suffice it to say, the government was spying on millions of Americans. Snowden's whistle-blowing did lead to some privacy reforms, but it seems that the consensus is that not nearly enough was done. As technology has advanced over the last decade the US government has capitalized on new means of surveillance, often under pretenses with approval from the people, often not.
Flock safety has cameras on thousands of streetcorners, as well as in parks and other public places. Some of these can be accessed on the free internet, no hacking necessary. Many are designed to track individuals; to zoom in and see what you're texting about, or follow you through the park as you rollerblade around, or to follow your children. How eerie is that? Cameras aimed at parks with special zoom-in and tracking technology, and they can be accessed with a few clicks on the internet by anyone.
Flock partners with the federal government, and so does Ring. Tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Zuck, and Musk collect our data and do whatever they want with it, certainly including sharing it with the government. Algorithms do more than feed us what they want us to see, they track our use. Tiktok rolled out a new privacy policy recently. If you make a video or type a comment or something and don't upload it or push send, that data will still be collected. Whatever you talk about, whatever words you use or faces you make, even if you store it in your drafts or delete the content all together, can and will be used against you. We're centimeters from thought-speak getting you a terms violation strike. And with facial recognition technology, how far are we really from the reading of defiance on a face setting off alarms or red-flags in some observation room? 2026 truly harkens to 1984.