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"Next Year's News This Week"
THE SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY DRIVING THE END OF LYING By Berit Anderson ______ Why Read: An overview of the surveillance technology blanketing online and offline life and its ability to dictate truth and deception. - bba ______ On Tuesday, Salesforce had its annual meeting in Las Vegas. CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to address thousands of employees gathered from around the world. Kicking off his talk, he thanked international employees for flying to the US and asked them to stand. Then he reportedly told them that ICE agents were present and monitoring them. The joke was never going to be a gut-buster, but it might have gone over better if Salesforce weren't itself a provider of customer relationship management (CRM) services to ICE, which has drawn significant ire among employees. Salesforce's CRM, like Palantir's, is part of the backbone of a growing surveillance ecosystem that allows for real-time location tracking, remote mobile-phone access, neighborhood video surveillance, facial recognition, and communications tracking. The latest tool in the stack has, as of yet, remained mostly unpublicized: the addition of emotional analysis and lie detection to real-time video surveillance. Employed in concert by a central government and combined with punitive action, this ecosystem can be used to eviscerate freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to bear arms, and the right to due process, among other fundamental human rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. According to the marketing materials of Penlink - an open-source intelligence company whose tools are used by ICE - its PLX platform allows access to personal communications in Outlook and Gmail; private messaging on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat; and Uber and Lyft app usage, as well as account activity in iCloud, Google, and GoDaddy. Benioff's blas approach to this ecosystem - and its most controversial customer - is indicative of a growing gulf between the perceptions of the executives building and selling these tools and the sentiment of the general public. According to one poll released this week, 6 in 10 Americans now believe ICE actions have gone too far. And while Benioff is a relatively public figure, many of these companies either deliberately fly below the radar or are owned and controlled by private equity or other financial holding companies, further obscuring responsibility for the impacts of their products. This week's Global Report takes you on a tour of the technologies and capabilities that make up this surveillance ecosystem - and explores the future implications of the tech stack enabling our new digital panopticon. |
