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Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?

The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.

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Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

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Do You Fear the National Security Agency Surveilling You?

I am befuddled by all the faux outrage in the online media bout the National Security Agency spying on us via our internet behavior and telephone calls.  Should we really be surprised by any of this?  After all, this sort of panopticonic staring by self-anointed government elites is nothing new.

Let’s take a quick Boles Blogs trip back through time to examine our intrepid reporting on this matter of the NSA spying on us.  We begin on June 30, 2006 — You are an Electronic Jigsaw Puzzle:

It’s horrifyingly fascinating how this government effort to connect all our dots appears to be orchestrated in pieces using separate private companies to deter detection of a non-severed surreptitious intent — banks for banking records; conservative ownership of personal web portals for access to MySpace data; internet providers who reply upon government regulation to stay in business are required to help monitor and analyze internet traffic patterns and process email keyword triggers — leads the cogent among us to question who we really are and if we actually own a right to any sort of privacy whatsoever.

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Peppering the Surveillance Shaker

For the price of a US dollar, our Panopticonic universe just became a little smaller — or larger if you’re a fan of being spied upon by strangers — with the release of “Surveillance Shaker” a new iPhone App that now lets you, with the shake of your iPhone, silently surveil the world without the watched knowing you’re watching.

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Respected UK Trust Slams Government Databases

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

Sunday Times journalist David Leppard has given an important pointer to an upcoming political tug-of-war in the UK. The Jospeh Rowntree Foundation (an important ‘liberty & democracy’ campaigning funder) has produced a report – published on Monday the 23rd of March – that slams the myriad of Government-sponsored ‘giant databases’ that exist or are planned for implementation in the UK.

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Modern Liberty and Sectarian UK ID Card Schemes

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

On Saturday the 28th of February at the Institute of Education in London, the UK consensus on a fight-back against intrusions into privacy finally gets going with the inaugural Convention on Modern Liberty.

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Digital Britain and the Privacy Theory

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

As our society shapes itself around speedier and speedier flows of information – some of it useful, some of it not, much of it with only entertainment value – it could be that our legal frameworks, both sides of the Atlantic, will see developments that entail a ‘democratisation’ of democracy itself.

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