The internet’s cookie monsters are harvesting your secrets. A £90bn industry is going unregulated and unchecked, gathering seemingly unrelated information for trade and profit.
How Big Data and the Internet of Things means the surveillance of everything. There’s simply no way to forecast how these immense powers - disproportionately accumulating in the hands of corporations seeking financial advantage and governments craving ever more control - will be used.
Mass surveillance does not follow the vertical logic of pure state surveillance as imagined by Orwell. Rather, it is diagonal – building on the information we voluntarily disclose to engage in our own "surveillance" of online friends. This makes it much more perverse.
Governments may use increasingly complex and sophisticated tools for censoring unhelpful information but the end result is always the same, despite the claims of toadying journalists.
We scrutinize the state for its Orwellian ambitions, but not the structures that render them feasible. Privacy debates have engaged with issues of political power and sensationalist culture, with little attention paid to the third factor – the economic context.
In India, surveillance is on the rise by the state to tackle crime and terrorism, and private companies are eager to meet the demand.
A global day of action under the banner Don't Spy On Us against mass surveillance takes place on Tuesday 11 February 2014. The UK's GCHQ is an important contributor to the various programmes of bulk data intelligence gathering organised by America's NSA. Now an alliance of British organisations ha
