Big Data is watching you

I’m not kidding they really are, I mean it sounds more like a conspiracy theory but it isn’t, I look like a paranoid but I am not. The NSA Scandal thanks to “good” or “bad” guy Snowden (a matter of perspective indeed) and its PRISM Program had shown us how dystopia can be accurate to predict the future.

1984, Minority Report and Brave New World all pictured us a society that is willing to sacrifice Human Rights for a somewhat greater good (of course through propaganda channels), well here it’s not exactly society (or not yet) that is willing to give up liberty for a little safety but rather governments through mass surveillance while colluding with tech companies by accessing their Big Data or Metadata.

The objective here for mass surveillance is not to spy on each citizen but rather to try to prevent any new danger or crime (mostly terrorist attacks) by analyzing those statistics gathered through cookies that web sites oblige you to accept. It’s sounds a lot like Minority Report where police arrest people based on predictions who are presumably guilty before they commit their crime and thrown at prison because of what they were going to do and not about what they did.

In this context, it is frightening that not dictatorship who are using these tools (but obviously, they could except for the lack of technology) but rather liberal democracies such as the USA, this is not a political issue but rather a Human Rights one, are we willing to give up our rights for more protection? As Benjamin Franklin used to say: “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”.

Snowden as a whistleblower had a moral conscious while revealing to the world (through journalists such as Glenn Greenwald) how far government-based surveillance extends questioning the kind of society we want to live in, the ones depicted by those dystopias we mentioned or the ones their writers hoped we can achieve? I feel like the ghost of Machiavel is haunting us (more than Karl Marx) whereas in his political philosophy the end always justifies the need.

Is Humanity doomed to lose its own essence? While looking for ways to tackle problems at their roots, we preferred neglecting them and only react once they showed up deeply rooted. Thus, in this society still soul-searching we need to fight surveillance with vigilance or should I say fire with fire. Don’t let ourselves be consumed by empty shell problems and rather focus on the real ones or the worse is yet to come.