A troubling Forbes article recently came across my news desk at WantToKnow.info. The piece describes how federal investigators secretly forced Google to provide identifying information about who watched certain YouTube videos. Here's an excerpt:
Undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker "elonmuskwhm," who they suspect of buying bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting. In conversations with the user in early January, undercover agents sent links of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software, then asked Google for information on who had viewed the videos, which collectively have been watched over 30,000 times. The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos. ... The court granted the order and Google was told to keep the request secret.
There's a lot going on with this story. For starters, buying bitcoin for cash isn't illegal. Reporting the acquisition incorrectly may be a crime, but simply buying the asset is perfectly legal. So the entire basis for this investigation is in question already. And it just gets weirder from there.
What agency or agencies were involved? The article refers to federal investigators and to undercover cops, but it doesn't specify who was actually doing the investigating. Was it local or state police with FBI support? DHS? My guess is that FinCEN was the agency behind this. They're supposed to be policing crypto and they don't yet seem to know how to do that right.
In order to identify elonmuskwhm, investigators didn't seek records from whatever website this person was active on. Instead, they sent YouTube videos to elonmuskwhm and requested the identities of all viewers of those videos. Why would they do it this way? It's indirect and resource intensive. One possible answer is that there was a preexisting relationship with Google that simplified and streamlined the government's request for information.
This case likely runs afoul of both the 1st and 4th Amendments. Saying you'd like to buy bitcoin is protected speech. The Google records request seems unreasonable, particularly given its sweeping breadth, and the Constitution explicitly protects us against unreasonable searches. The government agency involved must've known that its actions were unconstitutional.
Privacy advocates were understandably outraged when this story broke. It confirmed that the government can easily find out who consumes what media. Around the same time, the story of Rolla Abdeljawad came to light. Here's how that story begins:
The FBI spends "every day, all day long" interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that's what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity.
The government's escalating digital intrusions into our lives are unsurprising. Big Tech has been monitoring us closely all along. Often in partnership with the intelligence community, they built tools designed perfectly for tyranny, and now government agencies are beginning to pick these tools up to make use of them. Soon, AI monitoring of our activities will become the norm. Predictive policing blunders may enrage civil rights activists, but most people will accept the new normal with barely a complaint.
The obvious path out of digital tyranny is to abandon the legacy system in favor of better alternatives. That could mean watching videos on sites that can't provide the government with identifying information. It could mean defeating efforts to go cashless. But ultimately, I think society is unavoidably becoming more transparent as new technologies are integrated into our lives.
We can't have tech that monitors our every move AND have privacy in the traditional sense. What we do have, by natural right, is ownership of all of the data arising from our being. If someone is using this data in a way we don't approve of, we have grounds to demand that they stop. Ethical grounds, if not legal.
An Important Choice
Mass surveillance leaves us all feeling overexposed. Increasingly customized propaganda influences what gets talked about and how it gets talked about. Widespread censorship creates the illusion of consensus. This is the post COVID information landscape and it's very weird.
Making sense of this new landscape is challenging. Knowing what information to trust has never been more difficult. And connecting with others of like mind is hindered by social media algorithms that isolate those with dissenting views from each other online. Individually and socially, our sensemaking faculties are under attack.
At the same time, we have more information at our fingertips than even our recent ancestors could have conceived of. Astounding new things are coming to light every day and parts of the world that were once opaque are becoming more and more transparent. The machinations of power are becoming more clear and obvious, opening the door to a new conversation about what kind of society we want.
The control regime has always attempted to pave over alternative perspectives with an official story that furthers the regime's agenda. They've attempted to do this and never quite succeeded. However sophisticated the regime's psychological operations become, they'll never fool everyone. I'm not even sure if they're fooling most people these days.
The government now monitors our media consumption and sometimes tries to intimidate us for speaking freely. As dystopian as this may be, it'll probably get worse, leaving us with an important choice to make. Will we acquiesce, allowing the control regime to determine entirely the contents and tone of public discourse? Or will we find a way to connect with each other outside the regime's systems, communicating freely and getting loud on issues the regime would rather keep quiet?
Personally, while I've been censored online and been ostracized by friends for some of my less popular views, I still mostly feel free to express myself. The trick is in recognizing that free expression always has consequences. These consequences can be legal or professional, but more often they're social. I've definitely lost friends over my dissident perspectives, but I've made just as many new friends as a result of speaking my truth.
For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.