Is Surveillance Capitalism a Threat to National Security?

-- By LouisEnriquezSarano - 22 Nov 2020

In a word: Yes. Because social media and other behavior-capture firms (BCFs) specialize in influencing people and selling that influence to the highest bidder, they are vulnerable to exploitation. BCFs need divisive content to keep users engaged and our adversaries can create such content, thereby using the BCFs’ algorithms to manipulate public opinion. This threat is woefully asymmetrical—the countries that wish to destabilize democracies and weaken American power are quasi-invulnerable to reciprocal destabilization. Democracies must counterattack by abandoning the behavior capture business and requiring powerful technology firms to protect their users’ anonymity on the net.

Who’s Afraid of Little China? Or, the Call is Coming from Inside the House

Alarm surrounding China’s projection of global technological power, embodied in the debates about Tik Tok and Huawei, signals growing awareness about BCFs’ power. But thus far, relatively few commentators have connected the dots: if Tik Tok is threat, then so is Facebook. That is, the problem is not Tik Tok’s behavioral data aggregation as such, but its ability to use that data to influence Americans citizens. In that case, democracy’s adversaries need only master our own blue-chip BCFs’ advertising businesses.

As we know, the BCFs’ advertising platforms can easily and cheaply weaponized. Russia, for instance, believes it benefits from destabilizing America’s social fabric and maintains a campaign whose sole purpose is to sow chaos. It benefits by poisoning the public forum, by influencing even just a few people to adopt more reactionary positions.

This makes Russia’s (et al.) goals coextensive with Facebook’s (et al.) profits and business model. As one internal Facebook report put it: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” The logical progression is simple: people are attracted to divisive content, so Facebook uses its behavior collection algorithms to give people the content that is most likely to keep them on its platform, and advertisers pay for this attention, so parties that create divisive and false content provide a direct benefit to Facebook. It’s a symbiotic relationship—Facebook maximizes the content-makers’ power by using its behavior collection and predictive algorithms to get that content in front of the people who are most susceptible to its influence.

BCFs are thus incompatible with democratic institutions in an adversarial geopolitical environment, at least to some significant, if debatable, extent. Public opinion drives voting and political engagement, and public opinion is increasingly derived from and shaped by the BCFs. Elected representatives are still reactive to public opinion and thus to the divisions in public opinion stoked by BCF content. By definition, purpose, and design democratic institutions are susceptible to marginal changes in public opinion; and the BCF business model is built on its power to influence individual thoughts and behavior. (Zuboff, 214, 294). This power is used by our adversaries to influence public opinion and thereby distort and weaken democratic institutions. By undermining public trust and cohesiveness, malign powers secure the freedom to pursue their own ends in Xinjiang, Kurdistan, Armenia, South Ossetia, and elsewhere without interference.

You Can’t Fight Fire with Fire

De-Weaponization

Deweaponization would require a dramatic shift in default rules: telecoms and online platforms have to affirmatively secure internet users’ privacy, secrecy, and anonymity online. They can no longer trawl for behavioral surplus or build digital doppelgängers to use to sell us toothpaste. As long as that business model remains in place, the BCFs power to shape public debate will only grow; their market share and profits are definitionally tied with their power to influence people. Competition between the BCFs will also prevent them from truly policing the content on their platforms; if one firm removes the divisive content that keeps eyeballs on advertisements, then another won’t, and that platform will attract more users and more advertisers. Therefore, only direct intervention can end this destructive cycle and shield the public forum from at least some manipulation.

The Asymmetry of Destabilization Warfare—Counterattack

Behavior collection isn’t the 21st century nuclear arms race; there is no mutually assured destruction because we have no equivalent target. Our opponents have already dismantled their own institutions; they are the state and they control public debate. If they think their social media is under attack from the outside, they can shut it down. They have no qualms about overwhelming their own public forums with propaganda-spouting trolls and bots. So, unless the US is willing and capable of forming its own troll farms to combat Russian, Chinese, or Iranian propaganda, there just isn’t a way to fight back other than by dismantling surveillance capitalism. Not only is such a strategy unlikely to be successful from a tactical perspective, it is incompatible with a free democracy.

Supporting robust encrypted and anonymous communication services provides a more effective form of counterattack against the governments that seek to destabilize American and European democracies. The more Russian, Chinese, or Kurdish dissidents can speak freely on the American internet, the weaker are our adversaries.

The hawks might answer that these suggestions will harm US intelligence by inhibiting their own behavior collection. But that’s just an argument for mass surveillance, and it might help us win the battle, but it will ultimately lose us the war. Liberal democratic values just aren’t compatible with half-in, half-out cyber-influence war. Either we have to become Putin, or we have to find new weapons. Freedom is the ultimate weapon.

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