A television review by John Anderson, published in the November 20, 2024, edition of The Wall Street Journal, was titled, "The Spies Hiding In Our Pockets." The review was of an HBO movie titled, "Surveilled." Click that link for a trailer, and pay attention to the message. Or, to be perfectly clear, you should pay attention if you have any interest in protecting your personal privacy. The New Yorker has published a comparable warning, with even more detail.
The following is from Anderson's review [emphasis added]:
“Surveilled” evidently was constructed well before the Israelis began blowing up Taiwanese-made beepers used by Hezbollah, but the disclosures are scary enough. The most advanced spyware can turn a target’s phone into a monitoring system, Mr. Farrow says, drawing on work he did for the New Yorker. (The Wall Street Journal was out in front of the NSO story last year, as is acknowledged in the documentary.) It can turn the mic on one’s device into a kind of wiretap, take screen shots from a remote cell and avail itself of stored content. The problem hasn’t been the use of Pegasus against terrorism but its potential as a tool of totalitarian tactics against a country’s citizens. Or in corporate espionage. Or political suppression.The Biden administration’s 2023 executive order regarding the domestic use of commercial hacking tools is addressed here, but a more thoughtful argument about products such as Pegasus comes from Jim Himes, the Democratic representative from Connecticut and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. “What if one of my daughters were kidnapped? I want that tool,” the congressman tells Mr. Farrow. “It would be profoundly irresponsible of me to say there’s this amazing tool out there that might fall into the hands of the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Chinese, and we’re not going to let the FBI use it.” Will it be perfect? “It will not.”
IF our government were actually to increase its use of totalitarian tactics - aimed at all of us, not just "criminals," or "foreign spies" - which is something that many fear, and probably even more so after our last presidential election, it is clear that the warning provided by "Surveilled" is relevant. "Spyware" could be placed on cellphones without the users' knowledge, and then do all the things that are talked about in the quotation above, and that are highlighted in the video trailer for "Surveilled."
What is not mentioned in the review (and is perhaps not covered in the HBO movie) is the fact that our cellphones, in fact, are constantly surveilling us, without the need for any additional "spyware."
While special spyware is required for some of the advanced surveillance highlighted in the movie, everyone's cellphone is, constantly, keeping a record of every user's location. Where you go, and where you have been - and when - is information available to the cellphone companies that provide you cellphone service. The United States Supreme Court has addressed this fact in an important case, Carpenter v. United States, with that decision coming down on the side of "privacy." However, anyone who thinks that this Supreme Court decision will protect us from governmental abuses is, the way I see it, naive.
We are largely living, today, in a world in which "surveillance" is the norm, not the exception, and the main reason is that we have shifted our lives from the "real world" to a world "online." Our cars, for instance, are also keeping track of where we go, and when we were there. Is that really what we want? Is that really acceptable? Can we "go back"?
Well, of course we can "go back," and detach ourselves, both individually and collectively, from life lived in a self-imposed "surveillance state." But that won't happen "automatically." We would have to decide to reject all thosef alleged "benefits" that come from the technological transformation that has brought us to where we are now:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment!