Image by Lianhao Qu.

Structures of surveillance have their roots within the infrastructure of our commercial sector and government. This is not new, but the government’s audacity has grown monstrous with the recent example of Mahmoud Khalil and the blatant disregard for the most basic rights of habeas corpus.

Back in 2013, Snowden told us that the capabilities of state government actors were far beyond anything we ever imagined. He warned us that cellular phones are essentially surveillance windows into our lives. So much so that he manually extracted the microphones and cameras from his cellular phones. Furthermore, MSM and normal text messages are not encrypted, which enables the government to access our conversations via phone record providers. The N.S.A. has been collecting petabytes worth of information on every U.S. citizen.

But why is privacy important? A common cynical view is that if you have not done anything wrong, you should have nothing to fear. Deliberately or not, this implies that people who object to invasions of privacy are criminals. Furthermore, the key word “wrong” is defined entirely by the state, whose mandate to serve its people is increasingly fragilized. What happens when, in the name of security, the state deems legitimate dissent to be wrong? Privacy allows us to organize and protect ourselves from the state’s tentacular reach, and as such it is the right on which are founded all the other rights that must be available to the citizens of a healthy democracy.

How, then, did these United States of Surveillance that we live in today come to be? An autopsy is required, and an accelerated timeline must be laid out. When the Cold War ended in 1993, the defense budget was reduced, to the displeasure of defense executives, and the cutting edge of technology was no longer in the hands of Lockheed Martin, whose C.E.O. was then Norman Augustine, following a merger with Marietta Controls. Government officials realized that the commercial sector, Silicon Valley was developing the next generation of technological innovations. The internet was being built, computers and operating systems, including Linux, were being developed, and a renaissance of hand-held electronics was soon to follow.

Shortly before 9/11, Norman Augustine and Gilman Louie founded In-Q-Tel, a C.I.A. backed hedge fund, under the behest of C.I.A. director George Tenet. The purpose of In-Q-Tel is simply stated by Augustine himself in a 2015 Senate hearing before the Committee On Armed Services:

“Today, the leading edge of the state of the art and innovation is often to be found in … Silicon Valley… This led to the establishment of an organization that we called In-Q-Tel, the concept of which was very simple: conduct business on behalf of the government with Silicon Valley and others as they would deal with any other commercial firms. I believe that it is fair to say that this has been an immensely successful endeavor from virtually every perspective.”

This V.C. activity was funded with tax-payer dollars. With this goal in mind, In-Q-Tel invested in Google, Keyhole [later to become Google Earth] and Palantir. These investments gave them access to software licenses and allowed them to establish industry-government relations.

After 9/11, the United States was reeling from the shock of such a challenge to the empire’s worldwide hegemony, which had longed seemed inviolable due to the brutal foreign policies enacted throughout South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The injury of physical destruction was exceeded only by the insult of its suddenness, which moved Government officials in the Bush administration to pass an onslaught of policies enabling law enforcement to deploy surveillance tools on an unprecedented scale, in order to ensure that such an outrage would never happen again.

As a result, data collection began to accelerate, naturally........

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