The Public Private Surveillance Network
In 2018 Amazon acquired the company Ring, known for their Ring doorbells, which allow homeowners to install a camera on their door. The acquisition made sense as videos from across the internet showed thieves stealing packages (especially Amazon packages) from peoples’ doorsteps. To the average person, and for Amazon itself, this information was valuable. However, another party was also using the information gathered by Ring and conjunctively Amazon: local police departments. It comes as no surprise that Amazon, a company with a $600 million contract with the CIA, is also working to share its customers’ data with local police departments. Amazon currently holds contracts with 2000 local police departments across the country.
The efficacy of these contracts to solve crimes may be an easy argument to make as it was routinely used during the Iraq War Era to justify the PATRIOT act. “We must sacrifice some freedoms for national security,” was a common line of argument. In 2020, police departments made 1,900 requests to Amazon for videos and data that Ring users had — 57% of those requests were fulfilled. Meanwhile, Ring consumers and users were never asked if they were willing to give the information obtained from their Ring to the police. While it is technically within the contract you sign by having a Ring, most customers probably didn’t read the fine print, and assumed all videos recorded on their device were their property. A 2017 study done by Deloitte found that 91% of consumers did not read the terms of service on a product before agreeing to them. This is a huge legal loophole that is provided to police via companies like Ring. Police are forbidden via the 4th amendment to set up their own cameras inside one of their constituents’ homes, but through the Ring loophole they can watch them without their consent.
The Amazon-Police cooperation network is just another chapter in the increasing amount of public-private surveillance. Google’s Google Earth program and software has been used by the Department of Defense to conduct drone strikes and gather intel. While normally airspace over foreign countries restricts militaries from flying or operating satellites within, through private companies like Google, the US government can gather data and intel without sending their own satellites or drones. Civilian casualties from US drone strikes range from 473 to 2,200, (these numbers are almost entirely impossible to verify as it was illegal for the pentagon to report civilian casualties from drone strikes prior to 2009 and after 2015) so it’s not impossible to assume that Google Earth has been indirectly used to kill civilians.
Google has been an instrumental part of the CIA and NSA since its inception. The CIA and NSA is largely responsible for the creation of Google, originating with the MDDS (or Massive Digital Data Systems) program. This program dished out grants to researchers, such as Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders. These MDDS grants also went to companies such as Verizon, AT&T, and other telecommunications companies. While the details of MDDS contracts are not publicly available it can only be interfered that a quid pro quo approach is taken with these grants based on the data sharing that these companies engage in with the government agencies. These companies provide mountains of information to US intelligence agencies. During 2021, federal, state, and local governments and agencies issued 121,266 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, to Verizon and a similar 80,765 were requested to AT&T. Of which Verizon complied with 89% of all their requests, AT&T similarly complied with 95%.
Another item of contention glossed over in the debate regarding the PATRIOT Act, was the possibility of misuse. Most supporters of the act claimed you had “nothing to fear if you did nothing wrong.” Well, what if you didn’t do anything wrong?
On October 9th 2010, Yasir Afifi was getting his car repaired at an auto body shop. Upon inspecting his vehicle after the repairs had been finished, he noticed a very strange wire hanging from his car. Connected to it was a peculiar black box. Even to Afifi, who had little knowledge of cars, this was out of place. Promptly, he posted an image of the device on Reddit where users identified the device as an Orion Guardian ST820, a tracking device. Within two days of his post, Afifi was stopped outside of his apartment complex by two FBI agents. The agents questioned him about his travels to Yemen and Egypt, and a blog post his friend had made about “something to do with a mall or bomb,” implying he was affiliated with terrorists abroad and domestically. Afifi was let free and never questioned again as he was found innocent and the investigation led nowhere. The point being that the government had enough baseless suspicion to begin tracking an innocent person.
It can be deduced that allowing the government to use telecommunication companies, massive online retailers, search engines, and social media platforms for the purpose of surveillance, potentially puts many Yasir Afifis in the crossfire. Based on the Yasir Afifi example, the government has the ability to completely violate an individual’s privacy under false pretenses and therefore, one should be aware of what type of information tech companies are sharing with the US intelligence apparatus. In 2013 former contractor for the NSA, Edward Snowden, leaked millions of documents from the NSA proving that NSA employees had been using the technology and information to spy on individuals for personal reasons. Beyond that the NSA had been harvesting cell phone records from major telecommunication companies and cell phone providers without “showing relevance to a particular authorized investigation before collecting the records.” According to the Snowden achieves, Muslim Americans were more likely to be spied upon despite being responsible for less terrorism on average .
While some may argue that these are only fringe cases, or that the vast majority of cases solved through the information-gathering techniques used by the US intelligence apparatus are meaningful and generally a positive good for society, there is always the possibility for the parameters of suspicion to change. In late June, Ken Klippenstein, a reporter from the Intercept obtained a Pentagon document through a FOIA request (Freedom of Information Act request, essentially means you can sue the government for information) that stated that “Anarchists, Socialists, and Neo-Nazis” are terrorists. While it is quite certain from the FBI’s own studies show that Neo-Nazis are responsible for a disproportionate amount of terrorism in the US, it is very troubling to see Anarchists and Socialists also grouped into this category — especially in a country where someone such as Joe Biden is called a socialist repeatedly on major news networks such as Fox News. The point being that the definition is loose. If it’s reasonable suspicion that someone is a terrorist for the fact that they can be identified as a “socialist” based on the metrics of fill-in-the-blank intelligence agency, then a high percentage of the American population is already on the watchlist of the US intelligence apparatus.
The Constitution is not where your rights lie, they are written in the fine print of contracts for the hundreds and thousands of goods and services we consume. The veneer of freedom is shattered by the legal loopholes that these goods and services obligate us to accept. Beyond that, these companies are becoming an increasingly influential part of our lives to the point where it is a necessity to live a normal life with some of these goods and services. It’s very difficult to escape poverty, have a job, pay your water bill, etc. without having an internet connection. Internet access is nearly a necessity to live, and not something that cannot be bargained with. As Americans our freedom of privacy and choice is under threat.
