What You Really Have to Fear from Metadata

The NSA snooping story changes daily: They're reading our email! No, just counting our phone calls. No, just looking for patterns. No, they're watching us on the Internet.

Actually, it's better and worse than all that. Because the real winner is the plutocracy.

Jaron Lanier at The Nation explains:

The abuse of a system like PRISM would probably not look like a high-tech Stasi. PRISM is unlikely to be optimal for suggesting who should be dragged off in the night by a police state. (Though maybe the senselessness and randomness of violence is part of what keeps violent regimes in power, but that is another question.) Instead, PRISM could be the preamble to a regime of slow, subtle conformity.

Privacy
A government could engage in undetectable targeted repression using metadata. Something like PRISM might be hooked up to a secret civil defense mechanism in which certain people are subject to a couple of extra steps when they apply for a loan, for instance. Our enshrined secret FISA court would hear that those who might be linked to terrorists—albeit in only an exceedingly weak, insubstantial, statistical sense—must be investigated before buying up American real estate. (That could be part of a terrorist plot, after all.)

If you are a conservative, please read this paragraph: a misuse of something like PRISM might manifest itself as a slight increase in the difficulty with which conservatives can get credit. The difference would be just slight enough to be almost impossible to document definitively. And yet over enough time, the results would be substantial.

If you are a progressive, please read this paragraph: a misuse of something like PRISM might manifest itself as a slight increase in the difficulty with which progressives can get credit. The difference would be just slight enough to be almost impossible to document definitively. And yet over enough time, the results would be substantial.

Metadata systems can turn the kind of broad, almost subconscious mechanisms that have persistently held back African-Americans and Native Americans into a science. It’s been hard to say exactly why certain demographics and neighborhoods seem never to get ahead. Analysis can sometimes be harder than engineering.

Metadata as a tool of political power would paint with such a broad brush that you’d barely be able to notice it. If only people who oppose a war are targeted, for instance, a judicious number of hawks would also be drawn into the dragnet. The effect would be slight and statistical, but with the power of compound interest over time. Metadata could perfect plausibly deniable discrimination.

In a sense, it already has. Metadata is a slow, relentless concentrator of wealth and power for those who run the computers best able to calculate with it. The only form of targeting that is absolutely reliable is distinguishing those who run the biggest computers from everyone else. The former group can concentrate tremendous wealth, while the latter group languishes behind. The rise of big computers is a primary engine of the rise of the 1 percent. Therefore, metadata scheming could probably also be applied to subtly align a population with a government over some years. After a decade or two, the political opposition might be poor, divided, cranky and ineffective.

The proof is already with us. Young people, weaned on free Internet services that spy on them, seem to have accepted an America in which their financial prospects are reduced, and in which no one should expect “privacy.” The acquiescence of our young people is historically exceptional and bizarre. In the metadata age, privacy needs a new definition, and it might be “freedom from being profiled.” Or “equity with those who use the biggest computers.”

Metadata is a more natural tool for a plutocracy than for a junta. Metadata is not a tiger; it’s a barnacle. But don’t underestimate a barnacle. Tigers are endangered, while the ship of state is becoming more encrusted every day.