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Perfecting The Surveillance Society – One Payment At A Time
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
Governments and corporations, even that genius app developer in Russia, have one thing in common: they want to know everything. Data is power. And money. As the Snowden debacle has shown, they’re getting there. Technologies for gathering information, then hoarding it, mining it, and using it are becoming phenomenally effective and cheap.
But it’s not perfect. Video surveillance with facial-recognition isn’t everywhere just yet. Not everyone is using a smartphone. Not everyone posts the details of life on Facebook. Some recalcitrant people still pay with cash. To the greatest consternation of governments and corporations, stuff still happens that isn’t captured and stored in digital format.
But there is one place in the world where their wildest dreams are coming true, one place that is getting closer to the ideal where every purchase is tracked ... by a single device. That place isn’t a well-organized dictatorship or an overly paternalistic state where everyone is required to possess a national ID. In fact, it’s barely a state at all, dysfunctional in many aspects, catastrophic in others, decades behind in many ways, with people who are often desperately poor and illiterate: Somaliland.
There are barely any classic telephones – those devices with cords hanging out incongruously. Or banking services. Fiber-optic cables? Hardly. Copper cables? They’d just get stolen and sold for scrap. Credit cards? Useless. It declared its independence from Somalia in 1991 but hasn’t been recognized. Yet, payment by cellphone is becoming standard.
This phenomenon – widespread use of cellphones for a broad array of services, including mobile payments – is new, rapidly expanding, and for Africa, revolutionary. It has allowed people to leapfrog decades of painstaking technological development. And it has been widely reported with a mix of admiration and head-shaking; the latest in The Globe and Mail, which recounted how easy and common it is to use a basic cellphone for nearly all purchases, at stores or street vendors, to pay for a bus ticket or a shoeshine or some khat for a torpid afternoon high.
“We never handle a single dollar in cash,” explained Moustapha Osman Guelleh, COO of Coca-Cola’s local bottler. About 80% of its sales to distributors are handled via Zaad, the mobile payment service of the largest cellphone operator, Telesom. The rest are handled via bank transfers. “We don’t have any issues of having to keep cash in a safe,” he said. The company even pays its employees via Zaad. A cashless company, in an increasingly cashless society.
“What amazes me is that even illiterate people have learned how to use it,” said Khader Aden Hussein, general manager of the Ambassador Hotel in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland. The hotel pays all of its 300 employees and nearly half of his suppliers via Zaad.
They have their reasons. Text messages immediately confirm the transaction to both parties. Zaad transactions are in US dollars, eliminating the need to count and deal with wads of soggy crinkled shillings. It’s secure – well, at least it’s encrypted. Crime that targets cash is becoming unprofitable. Security improves. Subscribers prepay, so credit risk for the company is zero. Credit risk for subscribers is another matter, but hey. And Telesom’s servers capture every bit of data and retain it forever.
Mobile payments are becoming common in other parts of Africa: 17 million Kenyans use them, out of a working-age population (15 or older) of 25 million. What’s happening in Africa – getting rid of cash – is every government’s dream: no more anonymous transactions. It would end the underground economy, black markets, or smuggling. Small-time tax evaders would lose an important tool. Eliminating cash would be useful in the war on drugs or terror, or in any other such “war” on products or strategies. Even “anonymous” virtual currencies have to pass through internet service providers and leave a digital trail, unlike cash. If only cash could be eliminated!
But the killer technology isn’t the elimination of cash. It’s the combination of payment data and the information stream that cellphones, particularly smartphones, deliver. Now everything is tracked neatly by a single device that transmits that data on a constant basis to a number of companies, including that genius app developer in Russia – rather than having that information spread over various banks, credit card companies, etc. who don’t always eagerly surrender that data. Eventually, it might even eliminate the need for data brokers. At that point, a single device knows practically everything. And from there, it’s one simple step to transfer part or all of this data to any government’s data base.
Opinions are divided over whom to distrust more: governments or corporations. But one thing we know: mobile payments and the elimination of cash, a quantum leap for Somalis in their quest for modern life, will also make life a lot easier for governments and corporations in their quest for the perfect surveillance society.
Both cooperate in their quest. For example, Keyhole Inc., a venture-capital funded startup, was acquired by Google in 2004. Its product became Google Earth. Its technology filtered into Google Maps and Google Mobile. One of the investors? The CIA. And Snowden’s disclosures shed new light on these arrangements. Read.... Tech Companies And Their Love Affair With The NSA and CIA
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I thought this had some good insights:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q3Is0iwTMGE#at=557
Weocome to the matrix...ZEROS AND ONES with no audit. Good luck.
"how do you plan, execute and escape from the most surveilled State on earth" (meaning the USA)? and the answer is of course "you can't." sure...bombing here, an act there...but Snowden to the extent he has anything of value whatsoever (and he does not) by definition does not represent a threat. why the political class can't just come out and say that just boggles my mind actually...but hey, "it's America" so there you have it, there you are. the idea that the human race will ever get out from underneath what has been created here is simply not possible. "everything that can be known...now is." move along.
disabledvet re '"everything that can be known...now is." move along' :
Excellent. Now TPTB will recognize that I am too valuable to be left languishing in menial jobs for the rest of my life. I now expect them to give me full access to the necessary resources so that I may unleash my inherent greatness for the good of all mankind ( all includes me ). But given how long they have been spying on me, why haven't they already done that??? They must be traitors, I tell ya.
P.S. To NSA Nazis et al: No I cannot produce much of value if you shovel bucketloads of debt onto me. The goose has to grow before it can lay a golden egg.
The things that people THINK they know, and the things that they REALLY know are sometimes at considerable variance.
Just because CASH (monetary) payments are trackable does NOT mean that economic activity is.
Easy example - the "black market" in the former Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, etc. LOTS of transactions happened without even one ruble/deutschmark changing hands. There is trade; there are sales; there is economic activity that has little to nothing to do with "money" - or perhaps we should say there is "money", and then there is money. Value is sometimes counted with cash - sometimes in other "currencies." Money/currency, is only a convenient yard stick with which to measure relative value. Today's "money" actually HAS no real value.
It is these other "currencies" that are for the most part untrackable.
(Two kids in their parent's house... "I'll take take out the trash for you if you wash the dishes for me". "You take out the trash for three days and I'll wash the dishes for one day. Washing dishes takes longer and is harder so it's worth more." "Done!" - And an untrackable economic transaction has taken place.)
If a government thinks that it can track all economic activity, then those in the government who believe this are as dumb as Al Gore.
It is one thing to have something, but altogether different to know what it means or how to use it.
Yes, the huge amount of historical data can be of great use to the state if there is reason to sift through a particular person's data. First, the individual needs to be singled out. this is a backward looking tool, and a good one, but it cannot predict what random acts may be committed by random people.
Still, if Big Brother gets you in his cross hairs, the odds are heavily stacked against you slipping away.
"Escape" does not necessarily mean taking a physical journey. Everytime you transact business in something other than Petro-fiat - you have, at least a little bit, "escaped" the system. "Instead of Tune-in, Turn-on, and Drop-out" perhaps the new meme is "Tune-out, Turn-off, and Drop-off." I mean - how much dirt does the NSA/BankerMIC have on the Amish?
Quick Quiz:
Of our 44 Presidents, how many of them were Constitutionally licit as natural born citizens as defined by precedent and case law?
43?
good old grover. hard to believe he's the only one elected twice but discontinuously. counts twice on many lists. and a sex scandal to put monica in the shade: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/23/grover-clevelands-sex-s...
Except the founding which were a special case, all but two including the current one who may as well be the undertaker of the once great nation.
"of our 44 Presidents ..'
lost me at "our"
and again at "44"