Decentralizing the surveillance state

Americans have long been concerned about privacy and the danger of the surveillance state. Jokes and memes about how utterly watched we are, proliferate in our culture—and for good reason. There’s a history of sketchy stuff that’s been going down in government when it comes to privacy since…well, ever. 

Today with big data, corporations, advertisers, and governments all chasing our personal information like seagulls after breadcrumbs, digital security and privacy needs decentralization more than ever. You don’t have to take my word for it, though—I have receipts. Here’s the blog-length dose of “help, get me away from the surveillance state!” you’ve been wanting to peruse over morning coffee.

Postal espionage

In the 1840s in Great Britain, there was the postal espionage crisis. Communication was revolutionized by mail and correspondence became popular. When the government instituted the Penny Post, which offered a low, flat-rate for postage, volume increased. 

But when the public discovered that correspondence was being surveilled by the government and letters were being opened, it created a panic. Giuseppe Mazzini even put sand and poppy seeds in a letter to see if they’d still be there when he received it or if, in opening the letter, his FBI agent the post office, had dumped them out.

Wire-tapping fears

Across the pond in America, citizens became highly suspicious of wire-tapping in the 1970s after Watergate. The idea that the government could be listening to conversations on the phone was unsettling to people. That wasn’t the beginning of wire-tapping, though.

Wire-tapping was also used during telegraph days, during prohibition, by private detectives to catch cheating husbands, and by law enforcement to nab the Mafia. It’s no wonder The Wire was such a popular TV show. People seem to be both horrified and fascinated by the concept of the surveillance state.

Edward Snowden reveals the surveillance state

Another privacy and surveillance state panic was caused by Edward Snowden in 2013. Working with the CIA, NSA, and as a contractor for tech corporations, he discovered some shocking evidence of government spying and data gathering on citizens without their knowledge or consent.

The surveillance program called PRISM gave the government access to corporate servers for corporations like Google, Facebook, and Apple. As you can imagine, Americans were not pleased.

Net neutrality

More internet and digital security concerns cropped up in 2014 when everyone started talking about Net Neutrality. It was an extremely divisive issue, with some arguing that ISPs (internet service providers) should not be allowed to prioritize internet bandwidth or charge different rates to different customers. 

In 2015, the FCC made a net neutrality order requiring ISPs to remain data-neutral. This was later repealed but, as a result, incentivized corporations to keep closer tabs on user data. There is still a debate about whether government control over ISPs or incentivizing mass data collection is the lesser of two evils. But anti-establishment minds tend to argue that ISPs, corporations, and the government are all bad guys in this.

Five Eyes

Five Eyes is an international intelligence agreement between the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to gather and share information and surveillance between countries. It’s existed since WWII but still does spying today and is largely ambiguous and unknown to the public regarding how and what and data is collected and shared by the conglomerate surveillance state.

Many people are extremely concerned that Edward Snowden only uncovered a piece of the extent to which governments are implementing a surveillance state and spying on citizens, invading privacy, and breaching digital security. Today it may be advertising and behavior prediction models, tomorrow it could be social credit systems.

The cultural milieu

While many of us don’t spend our every waking moment sweating and wringing our hands about digital security and the surveillance state, there’s a cultural undercurrent that demonstrates we understand the risks. On some level, the jokes satirize and mock the government, but on a more cynical level, millennials and zoomers believe there isn’t much they can do. Call it a cope if you want, but the memes and conspiracy theories, however ironic, are top-shelf.

5G

Partially a meme and partially a legitimate concern, the 5G “conspiracy theory” may be different depending on who you ask. A very real danger was that most of the 5G infrastructure in the world was built by Huawei, which—it’s not a huge leap to assume—is in the pocket of communist China. Although US placed sanctions on Huawei for espionage have severely hobbled the once dominant Chinese telecom giant.

But the concerns have been waved away in an over-the-top escalation of the meme in which some people argued 5G towers cause illness, cancer, and even spread COVID.

Birds aren’t real, are they?

Another surveillance meme is the idea that birds (specifically pigeons) are not real but have all been replaced by the government with surveillance state drones. I’ll leave it up to you whether you believe this one or not.

Decentralization and regaining privacy

While we could meme all day and lowkey worry about whether we’re all headed to the gulag sooner rather than later, I’m not mentioning all of this just to send you into a panic attack. Decentralization and blockchain are looking to halt the surveillance state in its tracks and regain digital security, privacy, and sovereignty to citizens who’ve lost control of their data.

If decentralization succeeds for digital identity, web infrastructure, social networks, and even governance structures, we can combat what currently seems like a runaway surveillance state. In the end, everything always comes back to this: decentralization. If you’re not on board by now, I hope the next time you see a pigeon, it nudges you to think more about decentralization.