Both corporate and government surveillence support and rely on each other
Corporate surveillence and government surveillence aren’t seperate. They’re intertwined; the two support each other. It’s a public-private surveillence partnership that spans the world. This isn’t a formal agreement; its more an alliance of intrests. Although it isn’t absolute, it has become a de facto reality, with many powerful stakeholders supporting its perpetuation. The Snowden documents have made it clear how much the NSA relies on corporations to eavesdrop on the internet. The NSA didnt build a massive eavesdropping system from scratch. It noticed the corprate world was already buiiding one and tapped into it. Sometimes these corporations work with the NSA willingly. Sometimes they are forced by the courts to hand over data, largely in secret. Other times, the NSA has hacked into these corporations’ infrastructure without permission.
By the same token, corporations obtain government information for their own purposes. Some states sell driver license data, including photos, to private buyers. Some states sell voter registration data. The UK government proposed a sell of taxpayer information in 2014, but public outcry has haulted that, at least temporarily. The UK national health service also plans on selling patient health data to drug and insurance firms. There’s a feedback loop: corporations argue for more government data collection, then argue that the data should be released under open government laws, and then repackage the data and sell it back to the government. The net result is that a lot of surveillence data moves back and forth between corporations and governments.
One consequence of this is that it is hard to get effective laws passed to curb corporate surveillence—governments don’t really want to limit their access to data by crippling the corporate hand that feeds them.
References
- Schneier, Bruce. (2015). Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World Chapter 6. Consolidation of Institutional Control (Location 1304). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.