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The September 11 attacks they drew a line of demarcation between a time of withdrawal and another with radically different parameters and logics because the so-called “war against terrorism“It changed the geopolitical scenario and imposed new ideas of ‘security’, with costs in human rights and civil liberties, configuring a scenario in which privacy was the big loser.
While the mass surveillance was already a topic of growing debate years earlier – in October 1999, the British public broadcaster BBC reported on the secret international spy network Echelon – a month after the 11-S The US Congress enacted the Patriot Act, which authorized the electronic surveillance of warrantless “terrorism” suspects, as well as the investigation of their professional and personal relationships up to the sixth degree of contact.
This law, approved by the United States Congress, created a favorable scenario for the establishment of a permanent state of exception, which gradually established practices limiting constitutional rights and guarantees across the world, and imposed as “natural” scenarios of illegality and “exception”.
Thus, based on the “terrorist threat” Threatening the world, Washington justified preemptive war, of which Afghanistan and Iraq were but the most egregious examples.
In 2013, more than a decade later, former National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA contractor Edward Snowden, thousands of classified documents leaked which revealed how this almost unlimited power, handed over to the intelligence services, evolved, and how it had evolved into a complex network of collaboration between dozens of intelligence agencies from various countries, under the operation of which a globalized surveillance took place. is enlarged and consolidated without any control.
The Snowden Leaks showed that Washington allowed its security agencies to monitor phone and internet usage in 193 countries around the world and that they collect and analyze 5,000 million cell phone location records and 42,000 monthly million Internet records – including email and browsing histories.
In his book “Permanent surveillance”Snowden himself recounts the moral and ethical considerations which led him to compile thousands of documents demonstrating “the illegal activity of the US government”, to deliver them to journalists who analyzed them and made them public “before a scandalized world. “.
While the Patriot Act and the so-called war on terror they marked an important stage in the phenomenon of hypervigilance, it is a process which “was already underway before”, explained Beatriz Busaniche, president of the Vía Libre Foundation, which defends the fundamental rights in the environments mediated by information and communication technologies.
“It is very interesting to begin to trace this problem with the economic question, with the role of the United States and the North American industrial complex, in particular the military-industrial complex, and the geopolitical game of the implementation of the doctrine. security, ”he explained in chat with Telam.
According to Busaniche, a graduate in social communication and master’s in intellectual property, the “war on terror” declared by the United States was an important step in a long process of building the “dangerous other” and the fear within. companies.
This construction, he explained, allowed “a society with a very long tradition of defending civil liberties like the United States to allow the implementation of a law so abusive in terms of infringement of freedoms. civil rights and fundamental rights ”.
Accepting these mechanisms was part of the “duty” of citizens who “have nothing to hide”, which configured a hypervigilated society, functional at the current stage of capitalism.
And in this new doctrine of permanent surveillance, for Busaniche, “a new actor is emerging, which has to do with the large IT companies, with their fundamental base in the United States, Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc. “
The economic model of these mega-companies feeds on this experience of massive surveillance.
“The permanent collection, not only of data, but also of patterns of conduct, reading, behavior and tastes, makes it possible to predict more or less precisely where the will of people, their tastes, their consumption and therefore also lie. supposed political tendencies ”, detailed the expert.
He went on to point out that the range of alternatives that this information allows to exploit, including shifting political preferences to one side or another, is something that “although it sounds quite futuristic, fits the business model of capitalism. of the 21st century, which is what surveillance capitalism is.
Data, information and in particular foresight on what it is possible to do with this information constitute one of the central elements of capital.
Many human rights organizations and civil liberties defenders have denounced for years how in this tension between security and private life, the balance has always tilted towards the former, which implied a substantial loss of civil rights.
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