When Edward Snowden dropped his bombshell revelations about the level of surveillance being carried out by the NSA and various corporations and companies, what he revealed came as a huge surprise to ordinary citizens, both domestically and internationally.
The 6-part series below looks at the surveillance state and its development. While Snowden isn't interviewed in the series, other whistleblowers who were former high-ranking employees in the intelligence services are.
States always claim that citizens will have to give up some of their liberties in order for the state to provide better security.
While you might be ok with handing over some of your liberties in such a case, it's a different matter when companies and corporations are snooping on you. Tracking your every move online, they turn you into an asset that can be monetized.
That might simply and annoyingly be to direct targeted advertising at you. Or, perhaps, it's packaging up information they've learned about you and selling it on to third parties, without your permission and without paying you.
As we've just learned, the Personal details of nearly 200 million US citizens have been exposed through mistakes made by one company.
While your government might spy on you, at least there's a low likelihood that your information will get leaked online. Corporations tend to have a more lax view of security. After all, all those security measures cut into profits, don't they?
This is how the series below is described:
We live in the United States of Surveillance -- with cameras increasingly positioned on street corners and with much more invisible spying online and on the phone. Anyone who is paying attention knows that privacy could be out the window. All of this is not happening by accident - well funded powerful agencies and companies are engaged in the business of keeping tabs on what we do, what we say, and what we think.
To many in the world, today, the face of America also has A BIG NOSE for sniffing and sifting mountains of data—phone calls, emails and texts. And with many mouths silenced by paranoia to keep what they decide is secret, secret. America has become a Surveillance-Industrial State where everyone’s business has become its business, and where one huge US intelligence Agency has been given the sanction and unlimited amounts of money to spy on the whole world.
Mass Surveillance is the focus of this new 6 part investigative documentary series examining who is watching whom and why.
The entire series is up on YouTube and you can watch them below as well.
The takeaway is that unless you're using encryption in your emails or anonymizing your online presence, someone somewhere is tracking what you're doing. And that's only in the online world. If you carry a mobile phone/device with a GPS facility, your movements are being tracked as well.
Part 1: The Surveillance Machine
Part 2: Inside The NSA: How Do They Spy?
Part 3: Rise of The Press
Part 4: The Surveillance Industrial Complex
Part 5: Insider Threats
Part 6: The Future
