President George W. Bush opened the barn doors to the surveillance state, and the Obama administration ripped them off their hinges. To quote Ars Technica co-founder Jon Stokes, in the last decade and a half "America’s executive branch, working hand-in-glove with the private sector, has assembled the most advanced global electronic surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen."
The past 8 years have seen the launch of the iPhone, the rollout of 4G cellular, the emergence of cloud computing as the dominant server model, and the rise of Facebook and the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus it is that in the age of Obama, citizens began carrying in their pockets and purses a bundle of networked sensors the likes of which a J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t even dream of.
We also began to adorn private homes and public spaces with insecure “smart” devices that can tell hackers when we’re present and what we’re up to. Now, with the click of a mouse, agents in the bowels of an NSA data center somewhere in the Midwest can silently dip into the streams of location, audio, video, text, and other data that these unsleeping little spies constantly emit. […]
The end result is that we now live in a world where billions of privately owned, internet-connected smartphones, computers, cameras, point-of-sale terminals, and IoT devices are feeding a torrent of data about every aspect of our lives into the cloud, where it’s accessible to our government’s internal and external security forces either because they’ve eavesdropped on it directly or they’ve commandeered it from whatever private server it was sitting on.
Stokes talks about the "panicked tech elites" he knows who were very aware of what they were helping to create in the surveillance state. He writes about one he knows, who developed hardware in the private sector, and told him about the day the "feds showed up and began buying that hardware in bulk for undisclosed reasons." He knew what it was for, and when the Snowden leaks came out, knew his work was included in what the NSA was doing "because he helped build the technology described in those slide decks."
Again, these guys know the contours of the terrible power that Trump and his cabinet are about to come into. And this is why they, mainly a bunch of rich white hetero males, tried everything to stop him and are now either nervously trying to patch things up or trying to get their data out of Dodge. […]
No, our only real hope lies in technologies of resistance that ordinary people can use to check the surveillance state’s power at every level, from the individual smartphone to the network connection to the datacenter. Specifically, we need the major companies that host our digital lives—Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and others—to immediately convene a private-sector Manhattan Project aimed at bringing security, privacy, and truly anonymous political speech back to the Internet. And if Facebook persists in its privacy-hostile stance, then Mark Zuckerberg must be rejected by business elites as a man every bit as toxic as Peter Theil.
I believe that the engineers who built this monster can tame it—they owe that to all of us. What technology has broken, technology can fix. The folks who had a hand in building our digital panopticon must give us the tools to fight it, and then we must all commit to using those tools in every area of our digital lives.
Yes, all these major companies need to start working for their customers, and start protecting us. More than that, all those techies who were so instrumental in building the surveillance state, well they can start atoning right now. They know how all this shit works. They know how to defeat it. They're the people who need to create communications and data systems for the groups that are going to become the resistance. If you're a techie who helped create the surveillance state, the best thing you can do is volunteer your time with one of the many nonprofit groups in your area—for civil rights, reproductive rights, the environment, whatever—and make their technology safe.