INTRODUCTION 
The Big Picture of Social Control vs. Democracy
“Without the right of privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of opinion, and so there is no actual democracy.”
—Dilma Rousseff, former President of Brazil
This book deals with two very large and often amorphous concepts: privacy and surveillance in the contexts of government and the marketplace.
Both concepts have undergone changes over the millennia of recorded human history, and those changes have dramatically sped up and expanded over the past few centuries, starting with the widespread use of the printing press in the mid- to late-15th century, when books and newspapers began to proliferate across Europe, and in the rest of the “civilized” world by the end of the 17th century.
The development of radio, television, and the internet in the 20th century heightened the need to define more clearly what both concepts meant and how they applied both to governments (the public sector) and to individual and corporate players (the private sector).
The Thought Police and Big Brother are terms introduced into the popular lexicon by George Orwell in his novel 1984; Big Brother was the overweening, all-powerful government of Orwell’s novel, and the Thought Police were those who managed to burrow so deeply into every citizen’s behavior, speech, and even thoughts that they could control or punish behavior based on the slightest deviations from orthodoxy.
Orwell was only slightly off the mark. Big Brother types of government, and Thought Police types of social control, are now widespread in the world and incompatible with democracy, as I’ll show in more detail later in the book.
Most concerning for Americans and citizens of other “democratic” nations, the mentality of both has heavily infiltrated both American government and corporate sectors, reaching so deeply into the day-to-day details of our lives that the techniques and technologies they use can—and do—not only control but predict our behavior.
The goal of those who violate privacy and use surveillance is almost always social control and behavior modification. Setting aside pure voyeurism, those are the areas where money is made, power is accumulated, and political or business goals are reached.
And whether they are of government or of corporate Big Brother, the goals are largely the same and consistent with those just mentioned.
Secrets are now for government and giant corporations to know and hold, but not for average people. And they’re used by Big Brother to both acquire and hold power.
J. Edgar Hoover had secrets to hide, for example, so he knew well their power. A gay man at the pinnacle of American power, for most of his life the FBI director knew that in many US states he and his lover, Clyde Tolson, could be prosecuted and sent to prison for their private, consensual behavior.
Yet Hoover and Tolson lived together, and their relationship was an open secret among Washington’s cognoscenti. I still remember a beautiful summer day in Ireland, Louise and I sitting in the living room of author Anthony Summers and his wife, Robbyn, as they described to us the shocking details of Hoover’s life and abuses of power they’d uncovered writing Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover.1
That books like Summers’s weren’t published until after Hoover’s death is a striking testimonial to the power of surveillance and the blackmail material it can produce to keep powerful people’s secrets hidden even from the world’s best investigative journalists. Every politician or reporter of any consequence knew that Hoover had a file on him (they were almost all men back then, and powerful men at that time were far more likely to harbor salacious secrets), ensuring Hoover an unbroken hold over the FBI from its founding in 1935 to his 1977 death.
But Hoover didn’t use his massive FBI surveillance powers just to cow politicians and reporters; he also was interested in advancing policies close to his heart. A dedicated white supremacist running an FBI where all meaningful power was held in white hands throughout his life,2 Hoover (or an underling at his behest) famously sent FBI surveillance tapes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. having an extramarital affair to the civil rights leader himself, implying that they’d next go to his wife and the public if he didn’t commit suicide.3
Hoover also spent his entire career downplaying the role of Italian organized crime in the United States, because, among other things, Mafia godfather Santo Trafficante had the goods on his sexual orientation and regularly hosted him and Tolson for gambling junkets.
When, in 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy overruled Hoover and began prosecuting the mob, with the number of cases brought shooting up from dozens annually to over 700 a year in the early 1960s, the Mafia backlash eventually destroyed the Kennedy dynasty.4
There’s a more modern story of how surveillance and invasions of privacy have impacted American politics: the rise to the presidency of serial rapist, wannabe fascist, and crooked businessman Donald Trump.
The biggest Big Brother of the corporate world, Facebook, had for years been compiling massive troves of personal data on Americans (even Americans without a Facebook account, as any page with a Facebook Like logo on it can send your browsing activity back to Facebook), and sometime in the mid-2010s Cambridge Analytica hired a data scientist to put together an app that could suck down that data without Facebook’s knowledge.
Cambridge once bragged that they ended up with more than 4,000 data points on each of 230 million Americans from that effort,5 but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg identified the number as probably being 87 million Americans.6
This information was used by the Donald Trump 2016 and Ted Cruz 2018 campaigns to micro-target Facebook users for highly specific advertisements that essentially weaponized their own private lives to influence them to vote for Trump or to not bother voting for Hillary Clinton.
Brittany Kaiser is the former director of business development at Cambridge Analytica, a subject of the Netflix Original documentary The Great Hack, and author of Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again.
In a 2019 article for Fast Company titled “If Trump Wins in 2020, Blame Facebook,” she wrote, “My former colleagues ran data-driven social media targeting programs for both the Trump campaign and a pro-Trump superPAC backed by the Mercer family, also known as the ‘Defeat Crooked Hillary’ campaign.”
Campaigns like that, she alleged, “chose to dance on the line of our legal system, pushing the boundaries of hate speech and disinformation that would normally be considered illegal. Incitement of racial hatred, for example, would land most normal people in jail, but is allowed to proliferate on Facebook and other social media platforms paid for by politicians and their supporters.”
The Trump campaign, which she wrote spent “over $100 million promoting lies about Hillary and suppressing Democratic turnout,” used “deterrence” as their key word to describe “voter suppression.” The goal was to identify probable Democratic voters with a “weak” preference for Clinton and to then persuade them to not bother going to the polls.
Kaiser added, “They promoted fear-based falsehoods demeaning women, Mexicans, and African Americans. Seeing the internal case studies after the election shook me to my core.”
She noted, “In traditional politics, voter suppression was more obvious: putting polling booths in far away places, allowing endless lines to convince would-be voters to give up, or even enforcing last-minute requirements of new identification for voter registration. Today, voter suppression takes place digitally, so you can’t see it and call it out for what it is.”7
For example, wrote Issie Lapowsky for Wired magazine, “[o]n any given day . . . the [Trump] campaign was running 40,000 to 50,000 variants of its ads, testing how they performed in different formats, with subtitles and without, and static versus video, among other small differences. On the day of the third presidential debate in October, the team ran 175,000 variations.”8
Thousands of subtle points were used that may have influenced a particular type of person, whether they owned a particular type of bicycle or motorcycle, liked to wear a particular brand of jeans, had relatives who were gay or of a different race, or may have visited a porn or study-prep site (all hypothetical data points, as the true details are still entirely secret), to not bother to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Every day the fine-tuning became more and more precise.
And almost none of the ads were ever shown to the general public or found by journalists. A report in the Washington Post noted that “[m]ore than half of the voters the database marked for ‘Deterrence’ messages were Black, Asian or Latino, with particularly high percentages in predominantly Black neighborhoods in key areas such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida.”9
The result was a direct assault on democracy—just what the Trump campaign had hoped for.
As Sabrina Tavernise wrote of the election results in Wisconsin for the New York Times a few weeks after the election,
[B]y local standards, [Black voter turnout] was a disappointment, the lowest turnout in 16 years. And those no-shows were important. Mr. Trump won the state by just 27,000 voters.
Milwaukee’s lowest-income neighborhoods offer one explanation for the turnout figures. Of the city’s 15 council districts, the decline in turnout from 2012 to 2016 in the five poorest was consistently much greater than the drop seen in more prosperous areas—accounting for half of the overall decline in turnout citywide.
The biggest drop was here in District 15, a stretch of fading wooden homes, sandwich shops and fast-food restaurants that is 84 percent black. In this district, voter turnout declined by 19.5 percent from 2012 figures, according to Neil Albrecht, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission.10
An article for the Madison, Wisconsin, Capitol Times stated that Trump carried Wisconsin by a mere 27,000 votes, in part because “[t]urnout was down in most counties throughout the state, but particularly in Milwaukee County, where nearly 60,000 fewer votes were cast this year than in 2012. Clinton earned about 43,000 fewer votes in the Democratic stronghold than Barack Obama did four years ago.”11
If Trump’s ads targeting minorities had run on TV or in the newspapers, everybody would have known what they said, and the Clinton campaign could have rebutted them. But because the only people who saw them were those targeted, and within a day or so they vanished from Facebook (one writer has found 5,000 “receipts” but still no actual ads), it’s impossible to know how consequential they were.
Many politicians simply believed Clinton ran a flawed campaign; immediately after the election, I was quick to blame her and campaign manager Robby Mook for the loss. But then I knew nothing about how Trump’s campaign used Big Brother strategies via Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.
Neither did I know then what Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, described by the New York Times as a “longtime Facebook executive and confidant of Mark Zuckerberg,” would write in a 2020 memo to company insiders. Boz, who was in charge of Facebook’s advertising from 2015 through 2020, wrote, “So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes.”
He argued that Trump won because of the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser,” although he also pointed out that Russian trolls had used the platform to polarize American voters. “[T]he Russians worked to exploit existing divisions in the American public for example by hosting Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter protest events in the same city on the same day,” Boz wrote. “The people who [showed] up to those events were real even if the event coordinator was not.”12
Secrecy and anonymous communication have always been tools of politics.
When the Founders of America conspired to raise a rebellion against the British, they used secrecy and exploited Britain’s Castle Doctrine privacy laws to keep their insurrection undercover. They met in secret, and people who operated in secret posted pamphlets and flyers on trees and buildings.
The flyers that kicked off the Boston Tea Party in 1773, which turned most of the Founders from advocates for working with Britain into revolutionary insurgents, included one from an enigmatic Rusticus that proclaimed the following:
Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? ...
Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.13
Such language would have gotten whoever was using the pen name Rusticus imprisoned or perhaps even executed, but they could pull it off by operating in secret.
However, even then, the statements were largely public. Every iteration of politics in America from 1776 to 2015 operated along similar lines. One person could talk with a single other person or a small group in secret; one person could talk to many people in secret by anonymously posting pamphlets.
But that was it.
Until Trump and Big Brother social media came along.
Now, instead of one person talking with one other person, one person can talk with 100 million people in more than 150,000 different ways instantaneously, making any sort of psychological resistance nearly impossible.
Today, shadowy forces—some clearly aligned with hostile foreign governments—are starting and spreading conspiracy theories and alternative realities through opaque social media. The new beliefs adopted by the targets of these campaigns totally alter American politics with almost no media notice or oversight and little discussion in the public sphere.
This new and profoundly high-impact form of messaging has altered the fate and course of American democracy—as well as that of governments all over the globe.
As Paul Mozur said in a New York Times article headlined “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military”: “Members of the Myanmar military were the prime operatives behind a systematic campaign on Facebook that stretched back half a decade and that targeted the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority group, the people said. The military exploited Facebook’s wide reach in Myanmar, where it is so broadly used that many of the country’s 18 million internet users confuse the Silicon Valley social media platform with the internet. Human rights groups blame the anti-Rohingya propaganda for inciting murders, rapes and the largest forced human migration in recent history.”14
Authoritarian, antidemocratic governments across the world—the worst kinds of Big Brother—are not just monitoring their citizens’ social media activity but in many cases doing what the Myanmar military did: inserting their own memes and news to disrupt homegrown resistance and pro-democracy movements. China has gone so far as to create their own social media companies and ecosystems while blocking American and other companies with the “Great Firewall.”
Because none of this is done in traditional “billboard” media like radio/TV/magazine/newspaper/online ads but instead is microtargeted on social media and via email, it’s functionally invisible. That radically increases the difficulty that a democracy faces when trying to fight back without becoming an autocracy itself.
This constellation of surveillance tools and hypertargeted advertising, along with the emergence of Big Brother in both our economic and political spheres, is insidious because it’s hidden in plain sight, but only a few giant corporations actually control it.
When just a handful of people and corporations have access to these surveillance and behavioral modification tools, our democracy erodes because that tiny group of fabulously wealthy people has unmatched power to direct our economy and our government, as well as our society, our norms, and our culture as a whole.
As we will see in part 1 of this book, many of these tools are simply evolutions of early forms of social control and mass behavioral modification.
What we thought was just a sophisticated new way to sell us trinkets and lifestyle products has turned out to be a powerful technique to twist governance itself, bending nations away from the democratic “consent of the governed” to something that resembles 20th-century fascism but is much, much harder to stop.
