THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com.
Thomas McArdle
Silicon Tyranny
New technologies make surveillance easier
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lectronic spying is supposed to be what government does, but itâs private companiesânot at all limited to within the United Statesâthat produce the tools that spy beyond any snoop or spookâs wildest dreams of a few years ago. And today, tech companies bow to no one in being woker than thou. Whether itâs Bill Gates complaining that âThe world today has 6.8 billion people ... headed up to about nine billion,â but âif we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percentâ; or Twitterâs Jack Dorsey canceling former President Donald Trump and suppressing the readership of new stories about Hunter Bidenâs alleged corruption and its connection to his father that could have swayed the 2020 election. Consider the recent observation from White House press secretary Jen Psaki, commenting on Spotify attaching disclaimers to speech such as podcast superstar Joe Roganâs, who noted the now-documented fact of masks not protecting against COVID transmission. According to Psaki, âWe want every platform to continue doing more to call out misand disinformation while also uplifting accurate information.â Control of the propagation of information and the ability to know by electronic means the activities of the populace are two powerful tools that become unstoppable weapons when paired. Concerns about new technologies making surveillance easier are far from novel, and were more often to be heard from the left than the right. For instance, in 1979, dissenting in the narrow 5-to-3 Smith v. Maryland case on telephone privacy, Supreme
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Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, joined by fellow liberal William Brennan, warned that âMany individuals, including members of unpopular political organizations or journalists with confidential sources, may legitimately wish to avoid disclosure of their personal contacts. Permitting governmental access to telephone records on less than probable cause may thus impede certain forms of political affiliation and journalistic endeavor that are the hallmark of a truly free society.â
Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter have all already used their technological muscle against those who would drain the Washington swamp. Governmental access, however, may no longer be the main issue. As Justice Clarence Thomas notes in his dissent in Carpenter v. United States in 2018, cellphone location records are not a cellphone userâs property. âHe did not create the records, he does not maintain them, he cannot control them, and he cannot destroy them. Neither the terms of his contracts nor any provision of law makes the records his. The records belong to MetroPCS and Sprint.â And yet, as Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out in his decision in Carpenter, âa cell phoneâalmost a âfeature of human anatomy,ââtracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner ... faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctorâs offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales. ... Accordingly, when the Government
tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near-perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phoneâs user ... the Government can now travel back in time to retrace a personâs whereabouts, subject only to the retention policies of the wireless carriers, which currently maintain records for up to five years.â Combining Thomasâs and Robertsâs points, the records of ânear-perfect surveillanceâ belong to the tech companies. They already use them for marketing and other business purposes. In the future, especially if Silicon Valley and those in power in Washington share political enemies, they could use them to suppress opposition. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter all already have used their technological muscle against those who would drain the Washington swamp. Yet no one elected their CEOs to anything. They helped prevent President Donald Trumpâs reelection; they can destroy a candidate, a movement, and a political party if the American people allow them to. If, despite the Peopleâs Republic of Chinaâs genocides, regulation of motherhood, and quashing of political dissent, corporate giants within the free world such as Coca-Cola, Intel, Procter & Gamble, and Visa are willing to sponsor the Beijing Winter Olympics; why would they automatically be disposed against tyranny and oppression when it rears its head at home? If we think that high-tech surveillance, disinformation, and character assassination are only the stuff of the corporate puppets of communist China such as Huawei, and not our own ideologically driven powerful businesses, we will pay dearly for our naivete.