On this episode of the Plutopia News Network, Jon, Scoop and Wendy talk with Jennifer Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at the ACLU, about the expanding machinery of government and corporate surveillance and its threat to civil liberties and democracy. Jennifer explains how long-standing rules limiting government use and combination of personal data have eroded, enabling massive dossiers on citizens and immigrants built from government records, data brokers, apps, and new technologies like ubiquitous location tracking, spyware, and facial recognition. She highlights how border zones and immigration enforcement operate as Fourth Amendment “gray areas,” how ICE and other agencies exploit data broker loopholes, and how surveillance harms vulnerable people, from abortion seekers to benefit recipients wrongly flagged as frauds. The conversation also covers the politics and dangers of spyware, the importance and limits of tools like Signal, the role of hackers and security researchers in exposing abuses, and the way popular media normalizes surveillance as necessary for safety. Jennifer closes by stressing practical self-defense steps, the need to understand one’s “threat model,” and the importance of legal and political resistance, reminding listeners that although the situation is alarming, organized pushback can still win real protections.
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Jennifer Granick:
I think one of the biggest new things is that the rules that we had have kind of been thrown away. There were just these expectations that data I gave to the government in order to get Medicare or in order to get food stamps or something of that nature was going to stay used for those purposes. And there are rules about how the government is permitted to combine databases of information and when it’s allowed to do that. And what we’ve seen is a complete ignoring of those rules and this amalgamation of different databases of information into a dossier of people in the country, not just people who are immigrants, but also people who have been born here and were citizens as well. And you put together all these disparate pieces of information and it tells you a lot, maybe almost everything about somebody.
