← Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World Chapter 6. Consolidation of Institutional Control
Author: Bruce Schneier Publisher: New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Publish Date: 2015-3 Review Date: Status:📚
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1304 Corporate surveillance and government surveillance aren’t separate. They’re intertwined; the two support each other. It’s a public-private surveillance partnership that spans the world.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1305 This isn’t a formal agreement; it’s more an alliance of interests. Although it isn’t absolute, it’s become a de facto reality, with many powerful stakeholders supporting its perpetuation.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1308 The Snowden documents made it clear how much the NSA relies on US corporations to eavesdrop on the Internet. The NSA didn’t build a massive Internet eavesdropping system from scratch. It noticed that the corporate world was already building one, and tapped into it.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1312 Sometimes those corporations work with the NSA willingly. Sometimes they’re forced by the courts to hand over data, largely in secret. At other times, the NSA has hacked into those corporations’ infrastructure without their permission.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1325 By the same token, corporations obtain government data for their own purposes. States like Illinois, Ohio, Texas, and Florida sell driver’s license data, including photos, to private buyers. Some states sell voter registration data. The UK government proposed the sale of taxpayer data in 2014, but public outcry has halted that, at least temporarily. The UK National Health Service also plans to sell 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.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1330 The net result is that a lot of surveillance data moves back and forth between government and corporations.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1331 One consequence of this is that it’s hard to get effective laws passed to curb corporate surveillance—governments don’t really want to limit their own access to data by crippling the corporate hand that feeds them.