Even democracies have - and use - the tools of authoritarianism

And authoritarians - including Trump - are innovating new tools, fast

This is the text of the video I recently posted (also included below the article):

Today I want to talk about the tools of control that authoritarians use to monitor their populations.

These tools are already in the hands of more democratic governments. In many cases, they're already using these tools. We can expect that these tools will become more ubiquitous, more intrusive, and more controlling. What does this mean for our freedoms, including our psychic freedom?

We are all well aware of the incredible extent of intrusion into our lives by social media companies, Amazon, et cetera.

They have accumulated an extraordinary amount of data on every one of us who uses these apps, who our friends are, what we prefer to buy. Indeed, whether we are pregnant before we even know it ourselves. We've generally been worried that these data are used to sell us more stuff.

The mystery appearance of ads for easy fit trousers when I've only just started talking about the need to buy a new pair of trousers. Is my phone listening to me? But I'm interested in what government authority can collect about us. Information is the primary tool that authority uses to control.

I am going to be taking a closer look at the US for obvious reasons, but many of these tools and indeed worse are also available in other countries, including the UK, and I will mention these.

The US government can, with minimum effort and zero scrutiny , require private companies such as tech firms, social media platforms, internet service providers and data brokers to hand over user data. This is typically done through legal instruments like subpoenas, court orders, or what are called National Security Letters, compelling companies to provide information held in their systems. National security letters are a remarkable and sinister tool.

One short letter compels the likes of telecommunications companies, internet service providers, financial institutions, and credit agencies to provide information about their customers.

National security letters do not require a judge's or court's prior approval. Any FBI field office can just issue them more or less willy-nilly.

Companies that receive national security letters are required not to tell customers or users that they've received such a letter.

You may remember an encrypted email provider called Lava Bit that shut itself down rather than hand over encryption keys to its user data.

Note that the likes of Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo, et cetera, have not shut themselves down.

What this means is that they have almost certainly granted access to their data.

WhatsApp, for instance, claims that its data is encrypted, but we can safely assume that it has handed over the keys to this data to the authorities. In theory, national security letters do not give government access to the content of messages such as emails.

But since companies are required to hand over data such as the existence of an email, recipient, time sent, et cetera, it would take very little for the government also to demand the content. Note that national security letters also demand IP information ie the location of the user.

Reagan introduced national security letters, but the Patriot Act dramatically expanded their use and scope. It said for instance that the FBI was not required to have any specific facts connecting someone with a target for its investigations.

This reveals the first rule of thumb. Government power of intrusion is never reduced. It is always increased regardless of the circumstance. It accretes. Step-by-step; big steps when there is a particular security threat. But even after that threat has passed, the powers are not removed from government.

I fear that the powers the Department of Homeland Security is now using will not be rescinded even by more benign administrations. Let's wait and see.

In theory, companies are not required to hand over the actual content of the messages. But now Kash Patel is in charge of the FBI. Do you trust this conspiracy obsessed looney who has promised to go after Trump's political opponents to respect that restriction on the content of messages? If the FBI is already doing this, we have no way of knowing.

In any case, agencies like the National Security Agency have long been able to directly obtain communications, including emails, messages, and internet calls from major tech companies.

The PRISM program, for example, allows the NSA to target non-US persons and collect their communications, which may also include data from US citizens who interact with those targets. The UK is at least for now a bit more democratic and accountable than the US. But the UK government tried to compel Apple to provide backdoor access to all encrypted user data ie everyone in the entire world. Apple refused and is now appealing the order but has removed encryption for new UK users, which is in a sense giving the government the data anyway.

The UK used something called a technical capability notice, or TCN, which requires communication companies to adapt their technology so that government can access it, ie they have to build access points into their operations. This suggests that the UK doesn't even need the equivalent of a national security letter to access data.

It can just go right in there and, like the National Security Letter, companies are required to keep it secret that they have accessed this data. I guarantee you that every single UK based comms company has received such notices.

Mobile phones have the capability to record conversations surreptitiously, including by the installation of malicious apps.

Most infamously, the Israeli company NSO sells monitoring software for mobile phones, which does not require you to click on a link or open a message to infect your phone.

It harvests your data, messages and location and can auto self-destruct to avoid detection. This technology has been sold to multiple governments around the world, including authoritarian, but also supposedly democratic ones.

This technology was used to target Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi government agents. And you can bet your last dollar that the US has better technology than this. And given the close intelligence relationship between the NSA and GCHQ, we can confidently assume that the UK also has such technology.

It doesn't help that we've already made so much of our data public in our social media profiles and feeds. Now I'm a fan of cop reality shows where you can see police officers use openly available data such as who your Facebook friends are to work out who is associated with a particular individual from where they can then perform network analysis to map out the connections between those connected on Facebook potentially infinitely.

These TV shows also show the police using other tools like number plate recognition systems, and of course the ubiquitous surveillance cameras, which seem to be everywhere now.

I recently saw six clustered in just one spot on a leafy suburban street near to where I live.

And of course police also have access to movement data, emails, texts from phones, et cetera. But further to that, police forces are now using facial recognition software to identify suspected criminals.

These cameras are in widespread use, and they're not specifically legislated. They were first introduced by authoritarian states like China, but facial recognition is now used by police forces in the UK.

It's now even installed on street benches.

This brings us to our second rule of thumb. Technology used by authoritarian states to monitor and control their populations will ultimately be used and legalized by supposedly democratic states, including on park benches. Of course, all states share a common interest... control. Facial recognition technology is now commonly used in China, then in countries like the US and UK, to monitor entire crowds and pedestrians on the street. In China today, apps carry QR codes, which were used extensively to monitor citizens during COVID. Recently Shanghai has announced plans to upgrade its health QR code to a citizen code, which would link more personal data and services to a single digital identity.

There are also reports of QR codes being used to register households and link to police databases, further integrating digital surveillance into everyday life. In Xinjiang, all citizens are required to have QR codes on their houses. Just wait until governments in our allegedly free countries encourage us to carry QR codes.

It will be presented as all for our own benefit, of course. And let's not even mention embedded chips. Our cat is already required to have one. Soon it might be us. That's a joke, by the way.

I hope.

So with great ease, government can find out what you buy, what you watch, who you communicate with, what you say to them, where you are, where you have been, and they can locate your vehicle and observe your movements on the street. This is far more information than was ever available to the Stasi in East Germany or the KGB in the Soviet Union.

All this data can be used against you. In the US today, it's clear that online data is being used to entrap and imprison people. For now, foreigners on visas or green card holders inside the US.

One Turkish student at Tufts University was targeted for writing an article critical of university policy on Gaza and Israel in a student magazine. It is implausible that the DHS or ICE is reading student magazines. It's much more likely that her article was picked up by an AI generated internet search, the likes of which are probably being undertaken for all foreign students with a view to expelling them.

It would of course take very little for the same searches to be conducted on US citizens.

They probably already have been, and I predict that we will soon see prosecutions and expulsions, for instance, of naturalized citizens as the administration works its way up the chain from foreign students and green card holders to naturalized citizens and eventually US-born citizens.

There is a long history of countries, including the UK and US, using innovations in technology first against foreigners, those with no political clout, then against its own citizens. This is a third rule of thumb.

But there is now a new tool at play - AI - which can now analyze all your public data and data gathered by the government to profile almost any one of us with a few button clicks. This is called data integration.

The tech company Palantir founded and today part owned by Peter Thiel also the chairman of the company, nominally a libertarian, but by his actions clearly an authoritarian. Palantir has sold this tech to the US government, as well as Israel, which integrates data from multiple military surveillance sources to identify targets in Gaza.

There is a very close relationship with military technology. The techniques are very similar, the integration of different databases. Palantir's technology has been sold to the US military to integrate tactical data collected from different platforms to give a comprehensive overview of the battlefield. It has also provided integration tools to the Internal Revenue Service to unify tax data.

In turn, it will be used by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to target so-called illegal migrants, and those ideologically suspect to the administration. This provides us with the fourth rule of thumb. Namely, that military technology always finds its way to civilian use. Remember when armoured vehicles shipped back from Iraq and Afghanistan were sold for pennies to local police forces. They then turned up at protests, such as in Ferguson, with police snipers mounted on top of them, targeting demonstrators with long range rifles.

In terms of monitoring, witness, for instance, the use of surveillance drones to police borders.

Mark my words. We will soon see them over our own heads, all justified by that ubiquitous legitimizer of coercive authority, security.

Anyone who uses large language models for research like me can see the power of data integration, where a question about one topic or person is answered in seconds by an engine, exploiting many different sources and not always accurately.

I did a search for my views on Gaza using a publicly available AI tool.

It took about one second to come up with a 400 word summary of my views collected from no less than 11 different sources.

Note too, that the summary is inaccurate: I'm no longer a spokesperson for the Green party.

In Communist East Germany, the Stasi would've had to recruit people who knew me as agents and tap my phone to find out my views on Gaza. Now it takes one second on a laptop. One key aspect of modern surveillance is its remarkable efficiency.

We commonly assume that efficiency gains will translate into lower usage and lower cost. In fact, the opposite is often true. The economist William Stanley Jevons has shown us that increases in efficiency do not lead to less of a resource being used as we might think, but in fact, more.

We can infer from the efficiency of surveillance technology that it will be used more and more. This is my fifth rule of thumb. Indeed, we can expect that such aggregation tools will be used constantly to monitor the population. Data sources, cameras, communications, shopping preferences, banking and tax data will all be integrated to provide a form of total surveillance and with it total control.

The rise of technology, particularly AI, in national security and policing has been noticed meanwhile by investors who are being advised to buy companies like Palantir and others selling these tools to government.

I'm always fascinated by the precise links between capitalism, government, and the tools of authority. And here is one, capitalism and authority are working in cahoots.

Shoshana Zuboff's landmark book Surveillance Capitalism showed how companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, collect vast amounts of behavioural data from users often without their full awareness or consent, and use it to predict, influence and monetize human behaviour, shaping our decisions and choices, fundamentally undermining human agency, freedom and indeed democracy.

But now we can see capitalism and authority driving each other. They depend on each other. These are twin forces working in combination: capitalism's drive for profit, and government's desire - all governments - for control. Perhaps this might be the sixth rule of thumb.

So to sum up what we can expect.

Authorities will use the tools they have. Even tools used by nakedly authoritarian states.

These tools will become more powerful. They will become more intrusive and ubiquitous.

Technology used in warfare will first be used on foreigners, then on citizens. Authoritarian states such as the Trump's America we see emerging will be the first to use these tools, but eventually all governments will use them, including against their own citizens.

And I haven't mentioned quantum computing, which threatens the power to decrypt data, encrypted to the highest standards available to us as ordinary citizens . It has been reported that governments are already harvesting data today: our data as well as other governments' communications so they can decrypt it when quantum computing arrives. Governments, especially the Chinese and the US, are racing to develop usable quantum computing. Estimates vary, but usable quantum computing may be with us in the next decade.

I thought about preparing a video or article on what we can do about this. The truth is, however, there's not much. Going off grid and eschewing all electronics will of course also alert the authorities to the fact that you have done so and they will ask why.

Secondly, it is highly inconvenient, if not impossible, to go fully off electronics in a world where payments, communications, and shopping are more and more online. Do you fancy asking your boss to be paid in cash?

Governments are making it harder and harder to file taxes on paper - another form of control. In London where I live, there are shops where you cannot pay with physical cash, a phenomenon by the way that works to the considerable profit of banks.

I recommend two things

If you stay online: use encrypted communications like Signal and ProtonMail - make it harder for them. Note that Signal was developed by an anarchist . On these apps, messages are encrypted, end-to-end, and they keep minimal data, so there's very little information to hand over even if they are targeted by authorities. However, these will also be vulnerable to quantum decryption

Even if compelled by legal authorities, Proton Mail cannot decrypt user emails because it like Signal does not store unencrypted data or mailbox passwords. Tuta mail Based in Germany also seems pretty good, low cost, and unlike other email providers uses post quantum cryptography. But the downside of these apps is of course, hassle and also hassle for your contacts if you're gonna ask them to use a new email address. There is in a sense a battle between providers of encrypted communications and governments, but I'm afraid we can make a pretty good guess of who is winning. There are so many access points, including our phones and of course our own incompetence.

I remember the German sailors in the Second World War using the encryption device Enigma using their girlfriends' names as passwords, which helped the Brits decrypt Enigma. And of course, enormous computing power is available to government.

And there's also the fact that we don't know whether we should improve our encryption because we don't know what they are already able to decrypt. So this might be our seventh and final rule of thumb.

Also, you should be very conscious of what you post online. I will continue to post what I think, but I'm well aware that for many that's no longer possible and puts them in danger of arrest, imprisonment, deportation or worse, putting the onus on those of us at less risk to do so.

Of course one obvious consequence is that our freedom of speech has been curtailed dramatically. Ultimately the solution would be that rather than our data being out there in the cloud, it should be controlled by us, as one Columbia academic has proposed. We should have our own servers where our own data sits and we control who uses it. But I'm not sure how feasible this really is. Perhaps one day we will be able to use quantum encryption to encrypt our own data. Quantum encryption cannot, by its very nature, be decrypted because by intercepting it, you indelibly change it.

With the electronification of our lives, we have not only traded convenience for autonomy and agency over how we live, but we have also granted authority exceptional, unprecedented power to control us.

With our electronic space determined by big tech and government, our freedom of thought, communication with one another our freedom to speak freely have been fundamentally arguably irreversibly eroded.

We are at much greater peril of arrest or other forms of government coercion should the government choose to use the tools already available to them. And indeed that some already use.

This isn't just about the ability of companies to sell us things and manipulate our choices or government's ability to know what we are doing. There's something deeper going on too.

There is something profoundly troubling about the exposure of the self in this loss of privacy.

I hate the way that those who oppose surveillance are called 'privacy advocates'. It reduces something fundamental about our humanity and existence as individuals to a mere policy point. Never before have companies and governments known so much of our business, so much of our very selves, our identities, who we are. Something vital to our humanity has been lost - perhaps forever.

Like so many things that the combination of capitalism and its enforcer, government authority, have taken from us, this something that we have lost cannot be put into words.

Two disturbing updates to this post. The first provided by a friend, a quote from a recent article in The Atlantic:

"It’s extraordinarily hard, when every one of us is ceaselessly flaking off informational DNA, to live privately. And if you’re targeted by a nation-state with a signals-intelligence dragnet, forget it: Your face, or voice, or gait, or how you move your mouse will betray you. A properly equipped snoop using a method called Van Eck phreaking can replicate the contents of your laptop screen from an adjacent hotel room, even if your computer isn’t equipped for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, by detecting variations in electromagnetic radiation. The Pentagon has tested an infrared laser, Jetson, that can nail your identity from 200 yards away based on your signature heart rhythms, a Department of Defense official involved with the project told MIT Technology Review"

Second, a report from the New York Times, that Palantir, mentioned in my post, has signed a contract with the US government, potentially to compile a ‘master database’ that integrates all government-held data about American citizens (and presumably others).

A quote:

“In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.

Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.”

You can see a video version of this post here: