Blog Post 6: Government and Corporate Surveillance

When discussing possible reforms and legislation to the current state of government and corporate spying, it must be taken into account that government surveillance is aided by corporate surveillance. Corporate surveillance has brought harm to American citizens because of what private companies have chosen to do with personal user data.

First off, it is indeed troubling how the NSA and other branches of the government have explained the collection of American citizens' personal user data. Greenwald goes into depth on this subject in Chapter 4 where he argues that state spying on U.S citizens under the guise of "national security"  has the undertones of an authoritarian surveillance state and raises serious questions about the treatment of dissidents and other marginal groups.  He also goes on to explain the psychological effects of the 'Panopticon', coming to a rather disturbing conclusion, in that the government does not have to actually watch everyone all the time in order to stifle political dissent and activism. Just the fear of being watched is enough.

But not only is the psychological threat worrisome-there is also a very tangible and physical menace.  It appears that private corporations like Google and Facebook have a documented history of misusing personal user data. Google, by collecting personal user data and giving access to it to shady corporate advertisers has allowed them to target “individuals with the express intent to rip them off, sell them deadly products, and financially impoverish them” (Newman).  Moreover, there is proof which reveals that Google played a significant role in the recent financial housing crisis, whereby ad companies targeted users based on their racial characteristics provided by Google. Newman writes that this “constitutes the most damaging price discrimination inflicting consumer harm in American history" for which Google was the intermediary and as a result made millions of dollars in profits. Newman goes on to say that Google explicitly ignored subpoenas and refused to cooperate with various investigations. Also, other companies, like Uber, show that there is the serious potential for abuse of user data: in a recent interview, Uber vice president Emil Michael hinted, rather bluntly, that he would consider using personal information data in order to blackmail journalists who have said unfavorable things about the company.

            In an era where the Internet has become an integral part of American’s lives, it is not possible to live with the same degree of privacy as we did before. It is also not conducive to a healthy democratic society for citizens to remain in the dark in regards to the actions of the government. Greenwald writes that "while the government, via surveillance, knows more and more about what its citizens are doing, its citizens know less and less about what their government is doing, shielded as it is by the wall of secrecy".  Not only has the government operated behind this shield of secrecy, the same can be said about private corporations, and perhaps to an even larger extent. It is a bit naive to think that true transparency and complete accountability will be ever be reached, but as a democracy it is imperative that the U.S should keep these ideals as a goal. It is crucial that there should be laws which outline the extent of corporate reach and protect citizens from the abuses of their personal user data by private companies and address not only the issue of the collection of private information, but also what is actually being done with this data.