FT.com
December 26, 2013 7:42 pm
By Evgeny Morozov
The benefits of
personal data to consumers are obvious; the costs are not, writes Evgeny
Morozov
Following his
revelations this year about Washington’s spying excesses, Edward Snowden now faces a
growing wave of surveillance fatigue among the public – and the reason is that
the National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower
has revealed too many uncomfortable truths about how today’s world works.
Technical
infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous
surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of “internet freedom” and the sober reality
of the ever-increasing internet control – all these are interconnected in ways
most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have
focused on just one element in this long chain – state spying – but have mostly
ignored all others.
But the spying debate
has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the
soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism,
the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon Valley have not
received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we
do – and pay for – our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken
for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too
many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination,
have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad
too soon.
Mr Snowden created an
opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of
these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US’s
surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional
response. Much of this overheated rhetoric – tinged with anti-Americanism and
channelled into unproductive forms of reform – has been useless. Many foreign
leaders still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would promise them a
no-spy agreement, or at least stop monitoring their gadgets, the perversions
revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear.
Here the politicians
are making the same mistake as Mr Snowden himself, who, in his rare but
thoughtful public remarks, attributes those misdeeds to the over-reach of the
intelligence agencies. Ironically, even he might not be fully aware of what he
has uncovered. These are not isolated instances of power abuse that can be
corrected by updating laws, introducing tighter checks on spying, building more
privacy tools, or making state demands to tech companies more transparent.
Of course, all those
things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to
reach and harvest. At the very least, such measures can create the impression
that something is being done. But what good are these steps to counter the much
more disturbing trend whereby our personal information – rather than money –
becomes the chief way in which we pay for services – and soon, perhaps,
everyday objects – that we use?
No laws and tools
will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon
Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the lookout for
new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data – be it
information about their shopping or copies of their genome. These citizens want
tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it. Now that every piece of data,
no matter how trivial, is also an asset in disguise, they just need to find the
right buyer. Or the buyer might find them, offering to create a convenient
service paid for by their data – which seems to be Google’s model with Gmail,
its email service.
What eludes Mr
Snowden – along with most of his detractors and supporters – is that we might
be living through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal data
emerging as an alternative payment regime. The benefits to consumers are
already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As markets in
personal information proliferate, so do the externalities – with democracy the
main victim. This ongoing transition from money to data is unlikely to weaken
the clout of the NSA; on the contrary, it might create more and stronger
intermediaries that can indulge its data obsession. So to remain relevant and
have some political teeth, the surveillance debate must be linked to debates
about capitalism – or risk obscurity in the highly legalistic ghetto of the
privacy debate.
Other overlooked
dimensions are as crucial. Should we not be more critical of the rationale,
advanced by the NSA and other agencies, that they need this data to engage in
pre-emptive problem-solving? We should not allow the falling costs of
pre-emption to crowd out more systemic attempts to pinpoint the origins of the
problems that we are trying to solve. Just because US intelligence agencies
hope to one day rank all Yemeni kids based on their propensity to blow up
aircraft does not obviate the need to address the sources of their discontent –
one of which might be the excessive use of drones to target their fathers.
Unfortunately, these
issues are not on today’s agenda, in part because many of us have bought into
the simplistic narrative – convenient to both Washington and Silicon Valley –
that we just need more laws, more tools, more transparency. What Mr Snowden has
revealed is the new tension at the very foundations of modern-day capitalism
and democratic life. A bit more imagination is needed to resolve it.
The writer is author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’
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