Is Big Tech Running a Secret Trade in Intelligence Data?

Or is there some bizarre new strain of capitalism that gets off on losing billions of dollars a year?…

Ah, that dreaded moment when they stop wanting your attention, and reveal that what they're really after is your body. I'm referring, of course, to Big Tech.

Yes, as the gatekeeping wars intensify, the Silicon Valley preds can no longer hide their one-track thoughts. They want our bodies. Literally. Detailed scans of our faces, our eyes, our hands… And they would rather check our identity papers than spin us a marketing pitch.

Big Tech will not pursue any initiative, ever, if it doesn't primarily involve spying on people.

Does it not strike you as strange that as a facet of commercial enterprise, whose job it is to sell us nice things, Silicon Valley corporations are now so pathologically hung up on chasing something entirely alien to that brief? Something so unsalesy, so central-governmenty, so, er… police-departmenty.

Perhaps not, when you consider how much intelligence data is worth. I mean, if the FBI will pay $1.3 million to crack one solitary iPhone, how much could you make out of every intelligence data request, from every authoritarian body in the world?…

IS THIS REALLY STILL ABOUT MARKETING?

If you pass a glance among the globally-recognised Silicon Valley companies, you'll see a wide array of declared commercial functions. Search, shopping, social connectivity, security, storage, software, technological hardware, and many others. But you'll also see one common thread that runs through every single thing the companies ever do, like "Blackpool" through a stick of rock…

Surveillance. Dark, unwelcome, oppressive, seedy surveillance. Dark to the point that if an individual member of the public mirrored it in the offline world, they would be branded "sick" and would face criminal charges. That's a pretty high reading on the creepometer.

You do not need someone's fingerprints to sell them a commercial product or service. You do, however, need someone's fingerprints if you're running a secret forensics shop for the police.

Indeed, these dystopian wannabe dictators have adopted a surveillance-first innovation model. That is, when they introduce something new, its functions are merely a pretext for increasing the intensity of their snooping.

Recently, for example, we've seen Google float a phenomenally hostile, "Cloudflare-on-steroids" plan to exclude all "unapproved" software from the meaningful Web. "Unapproved", it should be stressed, equates to any software that doesn't conform to Silicon Valley's data-guzzling mandate. And Google has tried to justify this deeply discriminatory initiative on the following basis…

Nice sense of proportion, Google! I mean, we've got people sleeping on the streets and unable to afford food. We've got a slave trade emerging in rich countries because trillion dollar companies are STILL monopolising markets and handing all the work to robots. And you want to throw what's left of the free Internet into the control of the greediest people on Earth, in order to solve what you bullet-point as the fifth biggest problem in the world - namely, gamers failing to observe the rudiments of fair play? Great job, guys. Great job.

Dropping the sarcasm, it's pretty clear to see that the publicly expressed purposes of these initiatives are only an afterthought. Clearer still since most of the expressed purposes don't actually generate any revenue. I mean, how would Google profit from a subtle improvement in sporting conduct within the gaming community? There's no profit there.

Reality Check 101: Purposes expressed by capitalists, which don't entail them making any profit, are invariably bullshit.

In truth, there's now only ever one true purpose behind any new Silicon Valley initiative. To tighten the grip on the surveillance market. Everything else is just theatre.

There are so many things about these companies' behaviour that don't add up at face value. Only when you consider the organisations to be an extension of state control does their behaviour begin to make sense.

Surveillance Valley, as the author Yasha Levine dubbed it, places mass surveillance at the top of its list of purposes. Apparently, higher even than financial profit. We assume this because companies within the Surveillance Valley cartel will even run "services" at a catastrophic financial loss when their spying potential is sufficiently high. Hard to believe, but true.

The best recognised example is Amazon's Alexa, which loses $billions each year. But if you dig deep, you'll find many other examples of lossmaking spyware being retained indefinitely.

WHAT IS THE AGENDA?

So then you're asking yourself: why are these people content to chuck so much dead money into snooping? When did it become normal for a business to pump $billions into spying on the public, knowing there could be no financial ROI?

Discard the seedy side effects, like vacuum cleaners sending corporations covert photos of people in toilets - if indeed that is a side effect, and not just a manifestation of these warped companies' sick nature… But if you do set that aside, there are really only two possibilities left…

• Silicon Valley's long-term business plan is to establish a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style dictatorship, at which point all investment will inevitably realise its return.
• Silicon Valley generates vast, off-the-books profit selling data to the authorities and the police, which means that the losses made on civilian bugging devices like Alexa are not really losses at all. It's just that the revenue can't be shown, and it appears that the surveillanceware loses money.

Are they on a quest to EMBRACE state government, EXTEND state government, and EXTINGUISH state government? Why not? The three Es have worked well enough for them with everything else.

Firstly, we should note that those two listed goals are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they're quite closely related. So it's possible that the companies are engaged in the second point, whilst actively working towards the first.

And secondly, there's already plenty of circumstantial evidence to support Point 2.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

For example, lobbyists for the tech corporations - such as the EFF - constantly hyperventilate about the police and authorities being able to spy on the public, whilst mysteriously displaying a contradictory sense of resignation towards corporations doing exactly the same thing. In fact, the EFF even built an "Atlas of Surveillance" website to expose surveillanceware… But the surveillanceware only appears in the database if it's POLICE surveillanceware.

I mean, don't you find that odd? That a so-called "digital rights" group would come up with the idea of compiling a surveillanceware database, and then exclude everything that isn't used by the police? Why campaign ONLY against state surveillance, when the public are demonstrably opposed to ALL surveillance? Why hush up the best opportunity this millennium for the American public to take real action against corporate surveillance? And why campaign against direct state surveillance so vigorously and so relentlessly? How is it possible to protest THAT MUCH about state surveillance, yet be so content with corporate surveillance that you try to divert the public away from challenging it?

The businesses are middlemen, selling mass surveillance data to the police, off the books. In the context of capitalism, how else do we reconcile Alexa's loss of $billions per year, with its persistent survival?

Well, it could be that someone within every single one of these lobbying groups, unlike literally everyone else you ever meet, sees some glaring distinction between state spying and corporate spying. But it's far more likely that these groups are being paid, by the tech industry, to lobby specifically against state surveillance. And if that's true, there's only one reason those corporations would pay lobbyists to do that…

To protect their business interests.

That is, they're middlemen, spying on the public, and then selling their findings to states and law-enforcement groups.

And given the intensity of the lobbyists' campaign against state surveillance, the revenue that the Silicon Valley corporations make from this business interest would have to be very substantial indeed.

Other circumstantial evidence includes stark anomalies in the type of data towards which these companies are shifting their collection regimes. Why does a shopping company want fingerprints and hand prints? That's police department data - not shopping data.

No shop in the history of pre-internet life ever asked for anyone's eye scans, hand-scans or fingerprints before these surveillance-crazed technologists came along. Why? Because you do not need someone's fingerprints to sell them a commercial product or service. You do, however, need someone's fingerprints if you're running a secret forensics shop for the police. And with individual law-enforcement agencies documented over and over as having paid seven digits for data, that little forensics shop would certainly prove a lot more profitable than the rather less financially-viable crusade to stop online gamers from cheating.

Already, we have slipped into the noose of Big Brother to the point where rejecting just six commercial brands renders most of us unable to live. That's big.

There are so many things about these companies' behaviour that don't add up at face value. Only when you consider the organisations to be an extension of state control does their behaviour begin to make sense.

FAR-FETCHED

We've arrived at a point where the companies' expressed goals are actually more far-fetched than the assumption that they're on a quest to embrace the state, extend the state, and extinguish the state. After all, they've embraced, extended and extinguished everything else. Why not also state government?

When you think it through, that's really not far-fetched at all. Perhaps the only people who do still think it's far-fetched are the governments themselves. And that, indeed, is how the three Es work. The last people to spot what's happening are the victims, whose egos are so monumentally inflated by all the embracing and extending, that the extinguishing takes them completely by surprise.

By then, it's too late to stop the inevitable conclusion.

So let's wake up to this now. Already, we have slipped into the noose of Big Brother to the point where rejecting just six commercial brands renders most of us unable to live. That's big. Bigger than we're allowing ourselves to recognise. We have to open our eyes. Stop believing the words. Start believing the actions.