The Philosophy of Life Before Death and Afterwards

Ethics

Ethics

The Moral Agency of Spying: How The Top Ten Tech Companies and the Government Think Your Life is Worthless

Since Edward Snowden's whistleblowing campaign that began in the summer of 2013, spying via technology has entered the global consensus of daily life. The United States Government argued that its secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts, or FISC for short, had the authority to prosecute and detain people using metadata scraped from Telecommunications companies. Snowden's evidence showed us a deeper rabbit hole than the defense laid out by the government that state spying was not ubiquitous in the West and down to the very level of recording phone calls, reading text messages and the actual content of communications between people. The top ten tech companies which include the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc, have admitted to installing NSA backdoors into hardware and software sold by their companies. The companies themselves have been inherently spying on their users indirectly as well as directly.

First, it's necessary to examine the Constitution of the United States of America to see wherein the citizen has reprieve from surveillance abuse and overwatch. The fourth of amendment of the Constitution explicitly states

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."38

This civil liberty inherently protects citizens only from the government and not private corporations. The Economic Espionage Act of 199639 protects citizens and corporations from criminal abuses of technology, theft of trade secrets and similar provisions. The top tech corporations are consistent with abiding by the law on the face of their actions, but even when doing this, there are unintentional consequences as well as deliberate attempts at espionage. According to these various corporations, only certain types of data is collected, usually with the permission of the user. On mobile phones and on desktop computers, these platforms usually ask the end user for analytics as well as location data, access to files in storage, etc, and in the worst case, they don't ask for permissions at all to use your devices. What exactly these corporations are doing in secret from purview of the end user could be entirely obfuscated through real time hacking as well as in built features of the API these programs are designed on.

Let's assume the worst-case scenario where corporations are spying on you without your express permission. If rights that not even the government possesses are freely available to corporations, then how do we respond to the complete invasion of our privacy? We are heading into a world where this your entire life will be exposed to not just big corporations, but private individuals with the ability to easily eavesdrop as well as manipulate the technology you have or that is embedded in you. It's necessary to accept that in this worst-case scenario, there is no alternative but acceptance of the total state of overwatch.

There's simply nothing the average person can do in the time in-between the current moment and a moment in the future where cryptographic security can stop any sort of hacking attempt. Even if private corporations say all end user data is encrypted server side, there are still flaws and vulnerabilities which can expose the true

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Espionage_Act_of_1996