PART III
Spies, Criminals, and Creeps Are Watching YouCorporations watch you because they love you and they want you to love them. They watch you so that they know what makes you tick. They want you to smile when you think of them, because the most profitable customer is a repeat customer.
Corporations get scary when they forget that their customers are also human beings. We become lab animals for the testing of new product ideas or disposable obstacles to further profit. When a corporation feels backed into a corner by the choice between people and profit, it can lash out. People get hurt in weird ways. Sometimes they end up paying too much for groceries. Sometimes they end up eating rocket fuel.
Government watches us because it worries. It’s like our mother . . . if our mother had to constantly worry about us rising up and setting her on fire. It worries about our safety, but the government also worries that we’ll get sick of it and chase it away. All the government wants is for us to be calm and happy so that it can go about the business of arguing with itself and getting nothing done.
Government gets scary when it worries so much that it forgets it’s supposed to be protecting us as individuals as well as a society. It fools itself into thinking that the best way to protect us as a group is to pick a few individuals and pump them full of LSD and syphilis. It focuses so much on an outside threat that it becomes more dangerous to us than the threat it’s worked itself into a snit over.
Then there are the people who watch us because they have something to gain—knowledge, money, power—or, sometimes, because they’re crazy and have nothing better to do. The sort of person who watches you without the excuse of a job at a market research firm or a paycheck from the NSA is frightening because he is, quite simply, a scary person. He is at best a con man with only your money on his mind or, at worst, a slavering psycho with a bayonet named after his mother hidden under the floorboards of his deep-woods cabin. Either way, he’s dangerous and he’s not watching you for any other reason than that you’re a target.
The modern era of personal high-tech surveillance and Internet confidence games started with a few clever individuals scamming long-distance phone calls and credit card numbers. Soon enough, real-life con men—the sorts of guys who used to hang out in casino lobbies wearing cheap suits and stalking widows—saw the potential in computers and graduated to lurking in chat rooms looking for retirees to scam.
Pretty soon, the individual operators began to give way to the big-time mobsters. Twenty years ago, if you got scammed on the Internet, it was probably just some solo grifter running the same e-mail con over and over again from his mom’s basement. Nowadays, you’re more likely being ripped off by the IT boss of a Nigerian narcoterror outfit; the kind of guy who’ll take you for every penny and then cut your arms off for complaining about it.
Mobsters are no longer Italian family men with slick haircuts and expensive suits. They’re Russian chess geniuses running call centers full of computer science dropouts. They’re Buffalo black hat crews. They’re teenage Chinese cyberwar recruits testing a new e-mail bomb. They sit in heat-shielded rooms all over the world hacking health records, burning copies of stolen software, and distributing spam for gray-market drug dealers.
Your computer isn’t the only place you can be hit, and mobsters aren’t the only folks hunting you. High-tech tools once available only to government types can now be built or purchased online. Today’s stalkers and serial killers have access to the type of technology that only a few years ago would have made James Bond pitch a tent. Think you’re safe inside your house? Think again. Whether it’s from the house across the street, a hidden microphone in your car, or a camera secretly installed in your bathroom, someone could be watching you right now.