Facebook Tops 10 Most Hated Companies in America: Why Don't People Like Facebook?

If you listen to US officials -- intelligence and defense officials -- talk about terrorism, what they emphasize now is not Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, which they largely acknowledge has been eliminated. Or even Al-Qaeda in Yemen which isn’t really much of a threat to anybody. What they talk about is the threat of a home-grown terrorism.



This is now the grave menace that American terrorism officials will warn, needs to be restrained, and the solution to that has been the gradual transference of all these abuses that we let take root because they weren’t happening to us but were happening to us but were happening to people "over there," and are now being imported into domestic powers.



And the reason that’s being done isn't difficult to see. American policymakers know that the financial unraveling that took place in 2008 that’s even more visible in European states like Spain and Portugal and Greece, has never really been rectified, and it can’t be rectified because there are structural problems. The way in which oligarchs in the United States monopolize wealth and then use that wealth to control our political processes, ensure that this is not going to change, it’s only going to worsen. Mass unemployment, mass foreclosure, all these income inequality pathologies are here to stay, and the future that America policymakers see is visible if you look at what happened in London for a weak period of time and what happens all the time in Athens, what is happening with increasing frequency in Spain: huge amounts of social unrest. And you see lots of that happening. I think that’s what the Occupy movement, in many ways, is.



And the elites in the United States, both corporate and government, are petrified about that type of unrest, and what people in power always do when they fear unrest, is they start consolidating power in order to constrain it, in order to suppress it.



And this is what the Surveillance State is designed to do. It’s justified, in the name of terrorism, of course that’s the packaging in which it’s wrapped, that’s been used extremely, and in all sorts of ways, since 9/11 for domestic application. And that’s being, that’s happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using Patriot Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in the United States and all other dissident groups that have themselves [dealt with] with surveillance and law enforcement used by what was originally the war on terror powers.



The attitude that you typically encounter, and it’s not a very easy mindset to address or to refute, is that, and one that the government has sold continuously and peddled...is that privacy in the aspect I can understand as something to value, but ultimately, if I’m not really doing anything wrong, if I’m not one of the terrorists, if I’m not plotting to bomb a bridge, I don’t really have much reason to care, and people are invading my sphere of privacy and watching and learning what it is that I’m doing.



So I think it’s worth talking about the reasons why that is such an ill-advised way to think. Why it absolutely matters that privacy is being invaded in these systematic ways. I mean, one obvious answer is that any kind of social movement needs to be able to organize in private, away from the targets of the organization. (applause)



If you look at the revolutionary movements in the Arab world, one of the greatest challenges that they had was that the government sought all sorts of ways to prevent them from communicating with one another, either at all, or in privacy. The fact that the Internet was not nearly as pervasive in those countries actually turned out to be a blessing because it enabled them to organize in more organic ways. But if the government is able to know what we speak about and know who we’re talking to, know what it is that we’re planning, it makes any kind of activism extremely difficult. Because secrecy and privacy are prerequisites to effective actions.



But I think that the more difficult value of privacy, the one that’s harder to think about, the one that’s more important than the one I just described. And that is that, it is in the private realm exclusively, where things like dissent and creativity, and challenges to orthodoxy, reside.



It’s only when you know that you can explore without external judgment, or when you can experiment without eyes being cast upon you, that the opportunity for creating new paths comes and there are all kinds of fascinating studies that prove this to be the case. There are psychological studies where people have sat down at their dinner tables with their family members and friends talking for a long time in a very informal way. Then suddenly one of them pulls out a tape recorder and puts it on the table and says, “I’m going to tape-record this conversation just for my own interest. I promise I’m not going to tell anybody, I’m not going to show it to anybody, no one’s going to hear it, I’m just going to tape-record it because I like to go over all of the wisdom that you give me.”



And it’s an experiment to psychologically assess what the impact of that is. And invariably, what happens is, people who are now being recorded radically change their behavior. They speak in much more stilted sentences, they try and talk about much more high-minded topics, they are much stiffer in their expression of things because they now feel that they are being monitored. There was a pilot program in Los Angeles six or seven years ago that was in response to a couple of exaggerated news stories about rambunctious school children, elementary school children, on buses that were apparently being bullying and abusing other students.



The solution that they came up with was, they were going to install surveillance cameras in every single public school bus in Los Angeles county, which is the second or third largest county in the United States. The response, when it was ultimately disclosed, was well, this is going to be extraordinarily expensive! How can you have tens of thousands of working surveillance cameras with people monitoring them, recording them, every single day for every school bus in LA county? The answer that they gave was, Oh no, we’re not going to have working cameras in these buses, there may be a few buses that have working cameras, just so nobody knows which buses have those. We’re going to have faux cameras, because we know that if we put cameras up, even though they're not working, that will radically change the behavior of students.



In other words, we are training our young citizens to live in a culture where the expect they are always being watched. And we want them to be chilled, we want them to be deterred, we want them not to ever challenge orthodoxy or to explore limits where engaging creativity in any kind. This type of surveillance, by design, breeds conformism. That’s its purpose. that’s what makes surveillance so pernicious.



Another point I want to make is this. One of the points about the Surveillance State, one of the things that happens is that, the way in which it affects how people think and behave is typically insidious. It’s something that is very potent and yet it’s very easy to avoid understanding or realizing. Now sometimes people do know about the effects of the Surveillance State and the climate of fear it creates.



I went on a book tour last October and early November and I went to 15 different cities and in each of the cities, I honestly didn’t really care about the book events, I was much more interested in going to the Occupy camps in each city. It was much more enlightening.



One of the things that would happen is -- literally almost the entirety of my book tour was taken up by taking about the Occupy movement. It’s what everybody was thinking about, they had written many times that it was by far the most significant political development in many years, and I still think that. Everywhere I’d go to talk about the Occupy movement, literally all the time I would get people who would say things like (and I would be on radio shows, and I’d get calls that say this), like, "look, I’m really supportive of the Occupy movements. I want to go down there and be a participant in it, but I’m a woman who has a small baby. Or, I’m a man who has a bad leg, and given all the police abuse that’s taking place there and all the infiltration, I’m just afraid of going and participating in these movements."



That was definitely part of the effect of this infiltration and police abuse had, it created this kind of fear in the way that people knew.



I spend a lot of time with American Muslims and American Muslim communities doing the work that I do and where I go and speak, and one of the things that emboldens me and keeps me very energized and engaged about these issues is if you go and speak to communities of American Muslims is you find an incredibly pervasive climate of fear.



And the reason is that they know that they are always being watched. They know that they have FBI informants who are attempting to infiltrate their communities, they know that there are people next to them, their neighbors, fellow mosque-goers, who have been manipulated by the FBI to be informants. They know that they are being eavesdropped on when they speak on the telephone, they know that they are having their e-mails read when they speak or communicate to anybody. What they will say all the time is that it’s created this extreme suspicion within their own communities, within their own mosques to a point where they’re even afraid to talk to any new people about anything significant because they fear, quite rightly, that this is all being done as part of a government effort to watch them.



It doesn’t really matter whether it’s true in a particular case or it isn’t true. This climate of fear creates limits around the behavior in which they’re willing to engage in very damaging ways.



But I think what this Surveillance State really does more than making people consciously aware of the limits in those two examples I just described: people not wanting to go to Occupy movements and people in Muslim communities being very guarded is, it makes people believe that they’re free even though they’ve been subtly convinced that there are things that they shouldn’t do that they might want to do.



I always use dog examples. I have 11 dogs. It’s one of the thing, examples that I use. I know you probably think I’m crazy, it’s all rescue dogs, it’s one of the things we do, so I draw a lot of lessons from dogs. One of the most amazing things about dog behavior is, if you don’t want dogs to go into a certain place because it’s dangerous for them, one of the things you can do is put a fence around the area that you want to confine them.



But eventually, you can remove the fence and you don’t need the fence anymore because they will have been trained that the entirety of the world is within the boundaries that you first set for them. So even once you remove the fence, they won’t venture beyond it. They’ve been trained that that’s the only world that they want or are interested in, or known.



There are studies in what was formerly East Germany, which was probably one of the most notorious surveillance states in the last 50 years, where even once their boundaries were removed, once the Stazi no longer existed, once the wall fell... the psychological effects on East German people endure until today. The way in which they have been trained for decades to understand that there are limits to their life, even once you remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not things they need to transgress.



And that’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless against this omnipotent government corporate institution does to people, it convinces people that the tiny little box in which they live is really the only box in which they want to live so they don’t even realize being in prison.



Rosa Luxembourg said, “He who does not move does not notice his chains.”



You can acculturate people to believing that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipations and freedom, that is what this Surveillance State does, by training people to accept their own conformity that they are actually free, that they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited.



So the last point I just want to mention, and we can talk about this in the discussion that follows and it probably will, it’s usually what discussions afterwards entail, is what can be done about all this?



There are just a few quick points I want to make about that.



One is that you can do things that remove yourself from the surveillance matrix. Not completely, but to the best extent that it can. There are people who only engage in transactions using cash, as inconvenient as that is, it at least removes that level of surveillance. There are ways of communicating on the internet using very effective forms of anonymity, which I will talk about in a minute. There are ways of educating yourself about how to engage in interaction and activism beyond the prying eye of the U.S. government.



There are important ways to educate yourself about the rights that you have when interacting with government agents. So much of what the government learns about people is that they let them learn that without having any legal obligation to do so. So much of government searches or government questioning is done under the manipulative pretext of consent, where people thought they had to consent or they don’t have the right to, and give up information about information they didn’t need to give up. And educating yourself about what your rights are by going to the Center for Constitutional Rights Web site or the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms or the ACLU. Lots of places online will tell you how to do that.



Very important means of subverting this one-way mirror that I’ve described is forcible, radical transparency. It’s one of the reasons I support, so enthusiastically and unqualafiably, groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks. I want holes to be blown in the wall of secrecy.



The way that this ends up operating effectively is only because they’re able to conceal what they do, and that’s why they consider these unauthorized means of transparency so threatening.



The last point I want to make about things that can be done is that there are groups that are pursuing very interesting and effective forms of anonymity on the internet.



There are things like the Tour project and other groups that enable people to use the internet without any detection from government authorities. That has the effect of preventing regimes that actually bar their citizens from using the Internet from doing so since you can no longer trace the origins of the Internet user. But it also protects people who live in countries like ours where the government is trying to constantly monitor what we do by sending our communications through multiple proxies around the world that can’t be invaded. There’s really a war taking place: an arms race where the government and these groups are attempting to stay one tactical step ahead of the other. In terms of ability to shield internet communications from the government and the government’s ability to invade them and participating in this war in ways that are supportive of the “good side” are really critical as is veiling yourself from the technology that exists, to make what you do as tight as possible.



I really don’t think there’s one any more important front, or battle, if there are any, than combating the Surveillance State.



By: Glen Greenwald