Meanwhile, it felt as if every major tech company, including Dell, was rolling out new civilian versions of what I was working on for the CIA: a cloud. (In fact, Dell had even tried four years previously to trademark the term “cloud computing” but was denied.) I was amazed at how willingly people were signing up, so excited at the prospect of their photos and videos and music and e-books being universally backed up and available that they never gave much thought as to why such an uber-sophisticated and convenient storage solution was being offered to them for “free” or for “cheap” in the first place.
I don’t think I’d ever seen such a concept be so uniformly bought into, on every side. “The cloud” was as effective a sales term for Dell to sell to the CIA as it was for Amazon and Apple and Google to sell to their users. I can still close my eyes and hear Cliff schmoozing some CIA suit about how “with the cloud, you’ll be able to push security updates across agency computers worldwide,” or “when the cloud’s up and running, the agency will be able to track who has read what file worldwide.” The cloud was white and fluffy and peaceful, floating high above the fray. Though many clouds make a stormy sky, a single cloud provided a benevolent bit of shade. It was protective. I think it made everyone think of heaven.
Dell—along with the largest cloud-based private companies, Amazon, Apple, and Google—regarded the rise of the cloud as a new age of computing. But in concept, at least, it was something of a regression to the old mainframe architecture of computing’s earliest history, where many users all depended upon a single powerful central core that could only be maintained by an elite cadre of professionals. The world had abandoned this “impersonal” mainframe model only a generation before, once businesses like Dell developed “personal” computers cheap enough, and simple enough, to appeal to mortals. The renaissance that followed produced desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—all devices that allowed people the freedom to make an immense amount of creative work. The only issue was—how to store it?
This was the genesis of “cloud computing.” Now it didn’t really matter what kind of personal computer you had, because the real computers that you relied upon were warehoused in the enormous data centers that the cloud companies built throughout the world. These were, in a sense, the new mainframes, row after row of racked, identical servers linked together in such a way that each individual machine acted together within a collective computing system. The loss of a single server or even of an entire data center no longer mattered, because they were mere droplets in the larger, global cloud.
From the standpoint of a regular user, a cloud is just a storage mechanism that ensures that your data is being processed or stored not on your personal device, but on a range of different servers, which can ultimately be owned and operated by different companies. The result is that your data is no longer truly yours. It’s controlled by companies, which can use it for virtually any purpose.
Read your terms of service agreements for cloud storage, which get longer and longer by the year—current ones are over six thousand words, twice the average length of one of these book chapters. When we choose to store our data online, we’re often ceding our claim to it. Companies can decide what type of data they will hold for us, and can willfully delete any data they object to. Unless we’ve kept a separate copy on our own machines or drives, this data will be lost to us forever. If any of our data is found to be particularly objectionable or otherwise in violation of the terms of service, the companies can unilaterally delete our accounts, deny us our own data, and yet retain a copy for their own records, which they can turn over to the authorities without our knowledge or consent. Ultimately, the privacy of our data depends on the ownership of our data. There is no property less protected, and yet no property more private.
THE INTERNET I’D grown up with, the Internet that had raised me, was disappearing. And with it, so was my youth. The very act of going online, which had once seemed like a marvelous adventure, now seemed like a fraught ordeal. Self-expression now required such strong self-protection as to obviate its liberties and nullify its pleasures. Every communication was a matter not of creativity but of safety. Every transaction was a potential danger.
Meanwhile, the private sector was busy leveraging our reliance on technology into market consolidation. The majority of American Internet users lived their entire digital lives on email, social media, and e-commerce platforms owned by an imperial triumvirate of companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and the American IC was seeking to take advantage of that fact by obtaining access to their networks—both through direct orders that were kept secret from the public, and clandestine subversion efforts that were kept secret from the companies themselves. Our user data was turning vast profits for the companies, and the government pilfered it for free. I don’t think I’d ever felt so powerless.
Then there was this other emotion that I felt, a curious sense of being adrift and yet, at the same time, of having my privacy violated. It was as if I were dispersed—with parts of my life scattered across servers all over the globe—and yet intruded or imposed upon. Every morning when I left our town house, I found myself nodding at the security cameras dotted throughout our development. Previously I’d never paid them any attention, but now, when a light turned red on my commute, I couldn’t help but think of its leering sensor, keeping tabs on me whether I blew through the intersection or stopped. License-plate readers were recording my comings and goings, even if I maintained a speed of 35 miles per hour.
America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy. In the American system, law enforcement is expected to protect citizens from one another. In turn, the courts are expected to restrain that power when it’s abused, and to provide redress against the only members of society with the domestic authority to detain, arrest, and use force—including lethal force. Among the most important of these restraints are the prohibitions against law enforcement surveilling private citizens on their property and taking possession of their private recordings without a warrant. There are few laws, however, that restrain the surveillance of public property, which includes the vast majority of America’s streets and sidewalks.
Law enforcement’s use of surveillance cameras on public property was originally conceived of as a crime deterrent and an aid to investigators after a crime had occurred. But as the cost of these devices continued to fall, they became ubiquitous, and their role became preemptive—with law enforcement using them to track people who had not committed, or were not even suspected of, any crime. And the greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities such as facial and pattern recognition. An AI-equipped surveillance camera would be no mere recording device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer—a true robo-cop actively seeking out “suspicious” activity, such as apparent drug deals (that is, people embracing or shaking hands) and apparent gang affiliation (such as people wearing specific colors and brands of clothing). Even in 2011, it was clear to me that this was where technology was leading us, without any substantive public debate.