Slashdot Mirror
Is US Surveillance Technology Propping Up Authoritarian Regimes? (washingtonpost.com)
A senior policy analyst from a non-partisan national security think tank -- and one of their cybersecurity policy fellows -- sound a dire warning in an op-ed shared by Slashdot reader schwit1:
From facial recognition software to GPS trackers to computer hacking tools to systems that monitor and redirect flows of Internet traffic, contemporary surveillance technologies enable "high levels of social control at a reasonable cost," as Nicholas Wright puts it in Foreign Affairs. But these technologies don't just aid and enable what Wright and other policy analysts have called "digital authoritarianism." They also promote a sovereign and controlled model of the Internet, one characterized by frequent censorship, pervasive surveillance and tight control by the state. The United States could be a world leader in preventing the spread of this Internet model, but to do so, we must reevaluate the role U.S. companies play in contributing to it....
On one hand, the United States cares deeply about protecting a global and open Internet... On the other hand, American companies are selling surveillance technology that undermines this mission -- contributing to the broader spread of digital authoritarianism that the United States claims to fight. (This also implicates allies such as Britain, whose companies have also sold surveillance technology to oppressive regimes.) We won't be able to allay this situation until the United States updates its approach to exporting surveillance technology. Of course, this must be done carefully. But digital authoritarianism is spreading, and U.S. companies need to stop helping it.-
On one hand, the United States cares deeply about protecting a global and open Internet... On the other hand, American companies are selling surveillance technology that undermines this mission -- contributing to the broader spread of digital authoritarianism that the United States claims to fight. (This also implicates allies such as Britain, whose companies have also sold surveillance technology to oppressive regimes.) We won't be able to allay this situation until the United States updates its approach to exporting surveillance technology. Of course, this must be done carefully. But digital authoritarianism is spreading, and U.S. companies need to stop helping it.-
Is this a trick question? USA has been helping dictators for decades
"Americans want to be left alone" has to be the most ahistorical take on the twentieth century that I have ever read (and I have seen a few over the last two years). For a group of people that wanted to be left alone, US citizens were more than happy to fuel a century of military expansion that has left them with a base on every continent (and that's just counting the facilities above a certain plant value, the US has so much property in other countries that it doesn't know exactly what it has), so many arms and armaments that the surplus production has to be sold to the domestic policing forces, an unsustainable deficit created by not a little military spending, and an economy built on elements of the military industrial complex. Just in case we want to continue the fiction that the citizens aren't in on this, let us not forget that the quickest way to sour the electorate was (and still is) to suggest that a politician was/is weak on military spending. So yes, the US citizens just want to be left alone...in the sense that they would like everyone else in the world to either understand that the US is in charge or lay down and die.