In @Vice's "Surveillance Pandemic," @Snowden, @NaomiAKlein , Jacinta González and @bigblackjacobin discuss the use of surveillance technology to neutralize the #BlackLivesMatter uprising.



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One of the more compelling moments in the discussion came when Snowden talked about the complicity tech workers have in the use of their creations to surveil human rights activists in order to perpetuate systemic racism and violence.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxqx8q/snowden-tech-workers-are-complicit-in-how-their-companies-hurt-society

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Snowden's uniquely suited to speak to this issue, given that he risked his life and ended up in permanent exile when his conscience demanded that he reveal the scope of NSA surveillance to a team of investigative journalists.

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Tech has been rocked by a yearslong series of mounting worker uprisings, in which workers have demanded that their employers address the impunity powerful men enjoy when they sexually assault and harass women in the firms.

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Workers rose up against supplying machine learning tools for military drones, providing surveillance and analytics to ICE, building censored/spying search tools for China, supply facial recognition to law enforcement, and providing a platform for Trump's threats and lies.

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Other causes include environmental justice and sustainability, solidarity with low-waged warehouse workers, tech's funding of racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic politicians, and so on.

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These uprisings are significant because of the incredible labor shortage in some tech disciplines, which gives tech workers rare leverage over their employers. In some cases, if a specific tech worker refuses to build something, it will not get built.

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Snowden: "The reality is all work is political work. We’re all confronted with choices about how our labor is used, how we direct that, who we are really serving, who we’re working for and who benefits from the labor of our lives."

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Of course, tech has a long tradition of dire regrets that come too late. The canonical example is Oppenheimer, who watched the first nuclear explosion with dread, intoning, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

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Oppenheimer spent the rest of his career arguing against indiscriminate nuclear weapons development, but his campaign would have been much more effective if it had started BEFORE he led the charge to develop the A-bomb.

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Snowden: "Engineers like to believe that they’re like scientists, what they do is something that is pure, and they’re just trying to get the rocket up. Where the rocket comes down is not their department."

(A Tom Lehrer reference!)



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He went on to describe something akin to my idea of the "Shitty Technology Adoption Curve" - the way bad technology ascends a privilege gradient that may start with asylum seekers, prisoners or children, but it ends up encompassing everyone.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/20/pluralist-a-daily-link-dose-20-feb-2020/#privilegegradient

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"These technologies were forged in the war front but they have a way of moving to the home front and they’re used against the disenfranchised, they’re used against the people with the least, they’re used against vulnerable minorities, and then they’re used against everyone."

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"Even if you feel like this doesn’t affect you personally, it does and it will in time."

eof/