18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham once devised an unsettling new concept for state punishment and control. His idea: a new prison design with a centralized watchtower enabling the warden to simultaneously view every inmate housed in cells along a vast rotunda. Unable to know whether they were being observed or not at any given time, the prisoners would eventually self-discipline, learning to remain guarded in their actions at all times.
Benthem’s concept, known as the panopticon, became a powerful metaphor for surveillance and social control that is perhaps now more relevant than ever in the modern age of high-tech spying and social media. Commentator James Carey joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Wednesday to discuss the latest developments in US government agencies’ quest to control the flow of information.
“First of all as a Telegram user I'm glad I stuck with Telegram,” said Carey, responding to recent reports the application’s developers resisted pressure from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to install a backdoor for government surveillance purposes.
“I think that it's pretty plausible… we've seen in cases like the San Bernardino shooting where Apple didn't have a backdoor ready for the US government and they were essentially ready to threaten even Apple, which is a giant American company, over getting a backdoor to encrypted software, their encryption behind locking everything,” he added. “So it doesn't shock me that the US government and FBI is going out trying to get these backdoors and obviously the other intelligence agencies.”
“Doesn't shock me at all,” added host Garland Nixon. “Kind of what I expect from the FBI, all kinds of criminal activity and miscreant activity for the FBI – that's just any given Tuesday for them.”
The FBI has been strongly criticized for a number of abuses, including its role in the murders of Black activists Fred Hampton and Malcolm X. The controversial government agency once sent a letter to civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. warning of the imminent public revelation of his alleged extramarital affairs. The ploy has been widely considered an effort to goad the African American leader into suicide.
From 1956 until 1971 the FBI engaged in an illegal program of disruption, surveillance, and subversion of activist groups known as COINTELPRO.
“Here's the thing I want to bring up. We got to get rid of TikTok because the Chinese might be looking at something that we're doing,” said Nixon, referring to congressional efforts to ban the popular social media application in the United States.
“Based on this, it makes it a little hard to believe that the FBI and the US government are working hard to protect our data to make sure that no bad guys get their hands on it.”
Cohost Wilmer Leon also noted efforts to discourage the use of 5G routers by Chinese tech company Huawei in the US and Europe. Officials alleged the hardware may contain backdoors for the Chinese government. But revelations about the FBI’s interest in Telegram suggest the problem was perhaps that the Chinese equipment did not contain backdoors.
“It was actually they were mad because they didn't have a backdoor [for] themselves,” speculated Nixon.
Former UK cabinet minister Vince Cable once admitted that Washington’s allegations of security threats from Chinese technology are unproven, confessing the UK government banned Huawei equipment as a diplomatic favor for the United States.
“I think that nobody believes, obviously, that anyone wants to protect our data because everybody else is also on Facebook or Instagram, X, whatever it is,” said Carey. “It doesn't matter where you are. It doesn't matter if you're not on any social media. If you're using a cell phone all your data has been stolen by somebody at some point, you know?”
“No one really believes that the FBI is truly looking for any type of data integrity,” he concluded. “I think the major thing with TikTok is they don't want competition stealing your data. This is their job.”
“I think there's a real angle to try and remove any type of competition for the tech giants here.”
Former tech consultant and National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the exhaustive capabilities of US intelligence agencies in 2013, demonstrating that the NSA is able to spy on electronic communications taking place anywhere in the world.
His groundbreaking disclosure was followed by the so-called "Vault 7" leaks four years later, which revealed the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) possesses a number of powerful tools allowing the agency to hack into most consumer electronics devices and even frame foreign governments for cyberattacks.