The Snowden leaks revealed the global reach and evisceration of personal privacy the American military-tech complex routinely conducts. While Silicon Valley's highest profile search and social media firms have cried "foul" over the NSA's stunning data mining and analysis activities, these libertarian entrepreneurs are reticent to come clean about the depth and relentlessness of their collection of personal data. Of course, the money and power firms such as Google (yes, thanks for Blogger), Facebook, and Amazon now command should make one pause. However, few media outlets feel any urge to upset these data titans. (To this day, some major media outlets continue to identity data-driven Amazon's principal business as a retail concern, as if Jeff Bezos' ambition is simply to open an online version of The Home Depot.)
An Associated Press article appearing in today's siliconvalley.com attempts to illuminate certain truths animating the NSA-Silicon Valley struggle. AP reporters
Michael Liedtke's and
Marcy Gordon's useful piece gets to the heart of the matter: profit. The NSA's "violation of trust," according to the piece, has upset the Valley's expansion plans into emerging nations and their economies. Oops. Now nations such as Brazil are now at least publicly determined to keep close the data its citizens generate. Meanwhile, the Valley's lustful data expropriation and exploitation, along with its trumpeting of the virtues of "sharing," has produced a 21st Century version of colonialism that must certainly rub formerly colonized nations a very wrong way.
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| Facebook server farm in Sweden |
The stakes are high for the Valley. As the AP story noted, countries in addition to Brazil "and international regulators are considering strict rules for data-handling by U.S. tech companies. If that were to happen, it could cripple the companies' crucial drive to grow in overseas markets, and could fracture the Internet's seamless inner-workings."
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