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
E
lectronic spying is supposed to be what government does, but it’s private companies—not at all limited to within the United States—that produce the tools that spy beyond any snoop or spook’s wildest dreams of a few years ago. And today, tech companies bow to no one in being woker than thou. Whether it’s Bill Gates complaining that “The world today has 6.8 billion people ... headed up to about nine billion,” but “if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent”; or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey canceling former President Donald Trump and suppressing the readership of new stories about Hunter Biden’s 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 Rogan’s, who noted the now-documented fact of masks not protecting against COVID transmission. According to Psaki, “We want every platform to continue doing more to call out misand disinformation while also uplifting accurate information.” 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
44 I N S I G H T February 18–24, 2022
Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, joined by fellow liberal William Brennan, warned that “Many 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.”
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 user’s property. “He 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.” And yet, as Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out in his decision in Carpenter, “a cell phone—almost a ‘feature of human anatomy,’—tracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner ... faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s 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 phone’s user ... the Government can now travel back in time to retrace a person’s whereabouts, subject only to the retention policies of the wireless carriers, which currently maintain records for up to five years.” Combining Thomas’s and Roberts’s points, the records of “near-perfect surveillance” 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 Trump’s reelection; they can destroy a candidate, a movement, and a political party if the American people allow them to. If, despite the People’s Republic of China’s 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.
