The Future (18 page)
Authors: Al Gore
The surveillance technologies now available—including the monitoring of virtually all digital information—have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place. An investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union showed that police departments in many U.S. cities now routinely obtain location-tracking data on thousands of individuals without a warrant. According to
The New York Times
, “The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers
marketing a catalog of ‘surveillance fees’ to police departments.” The U.S. government has also provided grants to local police departments for the installation of tracking cameras mounted on patrol cars to routinely scan and photograph the license plates of every car they pass, tagging each photograph with a day-and-time stamp and a GPS location, and adding it to the database. A
Wall Street Journal
investigation found that 37 percent of big city departments are participating in this data collection exercise, which compiles voluminous information on the whereabouts of everyone driving cars in their cities and keeps it on file. At least two private companies are also compiling similar databases by routinely photographing license plates and selling the information to repossession companies. One of them advertises it has 700 million scans thus far. The CEO of the other said he
plans to sell the data to private investigators, insurers, and others interested in tracking people’s locations and routines.
Especially since September 11, 2001, business has been booming for the manufacturers of surveillance hardware and software.
The market for these technologies has grown over the last decade to an estimated $5 billion per year. Like the Internet itself, these technologies cross international borders with ease. U.S. companies are the principal manufacturers and suppliers of surveillance and censorship software and hardware used by authoritarian nations—
including Iran, Syria, and China.
Surveillance technologies initially developed by U.S. companies for use in war zones also often make their way back into the United States. The drone technology used so widely in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan has now been adopted by some domestic police forces—with predictions that new generations of unobtrusive microdrones equipped with video
cameras will become commonplace tools for law enforcement agencies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that as of 2012 there were already
sixty-three active drone sites in the U.S. in twenty states.
Advances in microelectronics have also made hidden cameras and microphones far easier to use. Some sophisticated versions of spyware are now being used remotely to surreptitiously turn on a user’s smartphone or computer microphone and camera to record conversations and take photographs and videos without a user’s permission or
awareness—even if the device has been turned off. Similarly, the microphones contained in the OnStar systems installed in many automobiles
have also been used to monitor the conversations of some suspects. Other software programs can be surreptitiously installed to keep track of a user’s keystrokes in order to reconstruct passwords and
other confidential information as it is typed into a computer or device.
Significantly, the cybersecurity threats faced by U.S. corporations—alongside the threat of terrorism—are being used as a new justification for building the most intrusive and
powerful data collection system that the world has ever known. In January of 2011, at the groundbreaking of this new giant, $2 billion facility in Utah, the senior official from the National Security Agency, Chris Inglis, announced the purpose of the “state of the art facility” was to “enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” The capabilities of the facility being built there (which will become operational at the end of 2013) include the ability to monitor every telephone call, email, text message, Google search, or other electronic communication (whether encrypted or not) sent to or from any American citizen. All of these communications will be stored in perpetuity for data mining.
This system is eerily similar to a proposal put forward by the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration two years after the 9/11 attacks. It was called Total Information Awareness (TIA), and the suggestion
caused public outrage and resulted in congressional action to cancel it. In the years since, politicians in both political parties have become fearful about challenging any intelligence-gathering proposal that is described as having a national security purpose.
In more recent years, the American people have successfully persuaded Congress to curb some government intrusions into their privacy. In 2011, the Stop Online Piracy Act and its companion Senate bill PROTECT IP Act—which were sought by entertainment and other
information content companies as a means of safeguarding their intellectual property—were found to contain new government authorities to shut down websites popular with the public if they contained any copyrighted material. The resulting outrage, and the effective online campaign
against these proposals, resulted in the withdrawal of both. However, the outrage generated by the prospect of losing access to online entertainment has not been matched by a similar outrage over the prospect of warrantless government surveillance of private communications among Americans.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is an example of a proposed U.S. law to empower the government to
eavesdrop on any online communication if it has reason to suspect cybercrime. While it is easy to understand the motivation behind this proposal, the volume of Internet communication that could be deemed suspect under the broadly defined terms of the law poses a de facto exemption for government agencies from a wide variety of other laws intended to protect the privacy of Internet users.
It is yet another example of how the cyber-Faustian bargain we have made with the Internet is creating difficulty in reconciling the historic principles upon which the United States was founded with the new reality of the Global Mind. As a technology writer recently put it, “If America’s ongoing experiment in democracy and economic freedom is to endure, we will need to think again about cultivating the necessary
habits of the heart and resisting the allure of the ideology of technology.” China and other nations dedicated to authoritarian governance are also facing a historic discontinuity because of the new reality of the Global Mind.
Every nation uses the Internet and every nation has its own ideas about the future of the Internet. The multiple overlapping conflicts accompanying the world’s historic shift onto the Internet are nowhere close to being resolved. As a result, there are calls for the imposition of some form of global governance over the Internet, which has, since its inception, been governed benignly by the U.S. government (and by a quasi-independent group established by the U.S. government) according to
norms and values that reflect the American tradition of free speech and robust free markets.
The fact that nations such as China, Russia, and Iran, whose values and norms are often in direct conflict with those of the U.S., are among the chief protagonists pushing to transfer authority over the global Internet
to an international body is reason enough to fear the proposal and to follow the unfolding struggle with care. It is unfortunate that
Brazil, India, and South Africa are following the lead of China and Russia.
Some corporations and governmental agencies are now developing “dark nets”—that is, closed networks that are not connected to the Internet—
as a last resort for protecting confidential, high-value information. Some Internet companies—most significantly Facebook, which now has one billion users and prohibits anonymity—have adopted a “
walled garden” approach that separates some of its information from the rest of the Internet.
In addition, some corporations that sell access to the Internet and simultaneously sell high-value content over the Internet have
attempted to slow down or make more expensive similar content from competitors. Although they raise legitimate issues about allocating the cost of expanding their bandwidth, this potential conflict of interest is also an important issue for the future of the Internet. It is the reason so many have called for network neutrality
laws that protect free speech and free competition.
The efforts by some corporations to control information on the Internet have led some to fear that the Internet could eventually be split apart into multiple, separate networks. However, that is unlikely to occur, because the full value generated by the Internet depends upon the fact that it is connected in one way or another to the vast majority of people, companies, and organizations in the world. For the same reason, the efforts by nations like China and Iran to isolate their citizens from disruptive forces coursing across the Internet globally are probably doomed to fail.
The world system as a whole is breaking out of an old enduring pattern that has been in place since the emergence of the system based on nation-states. No one doubts that nations will continue as the primary units of account where governance is concerned. But the dominant information system now being used by the world as a whole—the Global Mind—has an inherent unifying imperative, just as the printing press helped unify nations in the era in which they were born. And the decisions now confronting the world as a whole cannot be made by any single nation or small group of nations. For several decades, when the United States made up its mind, the world followed the U.S. lead. Now, however, along with digital information, the power to shape the world’s future is being dispersed throughout the globe. As a result, the
Global
Mind is not so easy to make up.
*
There is considerable debate and controversy over when—and even whether—artificial intelligence will reach a stage of development at which its ability to truly “think” is comparable to that of the human brain. The analysis presented in this chapter is based on the assumption that such a development is still speculative and will probably not arrive for several decades at the earliest. The disagreement over whether it will arrive at all requires a level of understanding about the nature of consciousness that scientists have not yet reached. Supercomputers have already demonstrated some capabilities that are far superior to those of human beings and are effectively making some important decisions for us already—handling high-frequency algorithmic trading on financial exchanges, for example—and discerning previously hidden complex relationships within very large amounts of data.
†
The memory bank of the Internet is deteriorating through a process that Vint Cerf, a close friend who is often described as a “father of the Internet” (along with Robert Kahn, with whom he co-developed the TCP/IP protocol that allows computers and devices on the Internet to link with one another), calls “bit rot”—information disappears either because newer software can’t read older, complex file formats or because the URL that the information is linked to is not renewed. Cerf calls for a “digital vellum”—a reliable and survivable medium to preserve the Internet’s memory.
‡
A predecessor of the Internet was demonstrated in 1969, when on October 29 the first long-distance communication between computers was sent from UCLA to SRI in Menlo Park. ARPANET was subsequently developed by the Department of Defense as a means of assuring uninterrupted communication among far-flung military units, and communication with intercontinental ballistic missile silos in the aftermath of a potential nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. However, the first description of an “Internet” based on TCP/IP appeared in a May 1974 paper by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, and the first three-network demonstration took place on November 22, 1977. The formal operational launch of the Internet took place on January 1, 1983. The public funding of a demonstration network linking supercomputers—the National Research and Education Network—repeated the pattern established in the 1840s, when a publicly funded demonstration of Samuel Morse’s invention, the telegraph, produced the capacity to send a message from Washington to Baltimore: “What hath God wrought?” (Morse had actually received the first message seven years earlier over a distance of three miles in New Jersey—the less inspiring and less memorable sentence “A patient waiter is no loser.”) The age of electronic, “instantaneous” communication was born. Five days later, the first public demonstration of the telegraph was conducted over the same two-mile line before a small assembled audience and featured a message that underscored the significance of the new invention for business: “Railroad cars just arrived, 345 passengers.” On May 24, 1876, less than thirty-two years after the public demonstration of the telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated the ability to send voice communication electrically over wires with his message “Mr. Watson, come here; I want to see you.”
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POWER IN THE BALANCE