The Internet Is Not the Answer (25 page)

“We had lived like behind glass,” explained the novelist Stefan Heym. Mielke organized his society around the same kind of brightly lit principles that the architect Frank Gehry is now using to build Facebook’s new open-plan office in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg—who once described Facebook as a “well-lit dorm room” in which “wherever you go online you see your friends”
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—describes this multimillion-dollar Gehry creation as “the largest open office space in the world.” Gehry’s “radically transparent” building will be without internal walls, floors, or private offices, even for senior Facebook executives. Its purpose, Zuckerberg explains, is to make “the perfect engineering space.”
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But Gehry’s office is an architectural metaphor for Zuckerberg’s cult of the social: a
well-lit
place where not only can you
see
your friends, but your friends—especially, of course, the autistic Facebook founder—can
see
you.

Mielke amassed personal data with the same relentlessness that Google’s Street View car collected the emails, photos, and passwords of online German citizens between 2008 and 2010—a privacy breach that Johannes Caspar, the German regulator in charge of the investigation into Google’s behavior, described as “one of the biggest data-protection rules violations known.”
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But, as a violator of our online data, Google faces stiff competition from its rival Facebook.
TechCrunch
’s Natasha Lomas suggests that Facebook’s “creepy data-grabbing ways,” such as the 2013 harvesting of the personal contact information of 6 million of its users, or that secret 2012 study to control the emotions of 689,000 of its users,
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make it the “Borg of the digital world.”
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who knows a thing or two about spying himself, even accuses Facebook of being the “greatest spying machine the world has ever seen.”
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So is Facebook really the
greatest
spying machine in world history—greater than either the Stasi, the CIA, or Google? Citing Google’s Street View car privacy violations, the German privacy regulator Johannes Caspar might doubt Assange’s assertion, as probably would privacy watchdogs in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy who collectively told Google in the summer of 2013 that the company would face legal sanctions unless it changed its 2012 policy of unifying personal data collected from all its different services.
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Others would also award this dubious honor to Google. Such as those plaintiffs who, in a July 2013 California court case, claimed that “Google uses Gmail as its own secret data-mining machine, which intercepts, warehouses, and uses, without consent, the private thoughts and ideas of millions of unsuspecting Americans who transmit e-mail messages through Gmail.”
¹³
Or the millions of students whose mail messages were allegedly surreptitiously captured by Google to build advertising profiles of them—a “potentially explosive” lawsuit, according to
Education Week
magazine, that is also currently being heard in US federal court.
¹⁴

In any case, before Facebook and Google, there was Erich Mielke’s twentieth-century Stasi. Mielke was originally against Honecker’s vision of digitizing all the Stasi’s analog records. But by August 1989, as protests against the communist regime intensified, he gave the order to begin the digital collation of information of every East German citizen. Officially known as the “Regulation for the Use of Stored Data,” it sought to collect all personal data from the country’s legal institutions, banks, insurance agencies, post offices, hospitals, libraries, and radio and television companies. According to the East Germany historian Stefan Wolle, Mielke was particularly enthusiastic about the “complete interconnectedness” of this data project.
¹⁵
Rather than socialist man, Wolle says, Mielke wanted to create crystal man (“der gläserne Mensch”). Mielke’s goal was to build a place where everyone lived “behind glass” and nobody could escape his electronic gaze.

In contrast, however, with the Internet, Erich Mielke’s “Regulation for the Use of Stored Data” project was never realized. The Wall fell in November 1989 and he was arrested in 1990, imprisoned in 1993, and died in 2000. But Mielke’s work has been memorialized in the old Berlin headquarters of the Stasi, which has been transformed into a museum displaying the technologies of surveillance that he used to snoop on the East German people.

The former East German Ministry for State Security is located on a particularly gray, nondescript street near the Magdalenenstrasse U-Bahn station, a few subway stops away from the center of Berlin. It’s not too far from the US embassy on Pariser Platz, where, the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed, the NSA had a spy hub that monitored the cell phone calls of German chancellor Angela Merkel
¹⁶
—a privacy breach so angering Merkel that the chancellor, who grew up in East Germany, compared the snooping practices of the NSA to the Stasi’s.
¹⁷
Nor is it a great distance from the British embassy beside the Brandenburg Gate, where, according to documents leaked by Snowden, the British intelligence agency GCHQ was running its own separate spying operation on the German government.
¹⁸

The gray old Stasi headquarters in Berlin, permanently frozen now in its 1989 appearance, is defiantly analog. The Stasiplex certainly is no Googleplex. There’s nothing high-tech about either the office’s dingy, cramped rooms or the electric typewriters, rotary telephones, and primitive switchboards on all of its desks. In spite of Mielke’s order to network its information, much of Stasi’s data in 1989 was still confined to handwritten or typed index cards. The museum even has an index card on display written by Mielke’s secretary explaining what the Stasi chief liked to eat for breakfast.

But for all its millions of meticulously transcribed index cards, East Germany’s former ministry of surveillance is as much an introduction to the digital future as it is a look back at the analog past. As a museum displaying how technology was used to acquire other people’s data, the Stasi museum—in our age of data-hungry multinationals like Google and Facebook and big data agencies like NSA and GCHQ—has contemporary relevance. Like the seemingly insatiable thirst of both contemporary government intelligence organizations and Internet companies for our most intimate information, the Stasi’s appetite for data was astonishing. The museum’s exhibits include such data-gathering technologies as miniature cameras hidden in pens, tie pins, and neckties. It has several rooms dedicated to showing off locally made Zeiss-Jena cameras concealed in handbags, briefcases, purses, and thermos. One exhibit even features a watering can with a hidden camera near its spout.

Yet there is one thing about the Firm that distinguishes it from Internet companies like Google or Facebook. To borrow a popular Silicon Valley term, Erich Mielke’s operation didn’t “scale.” Mielke was a twentieth-century information thief who may have transformed East Germany into a data kleptocracy. But compared with twenty-first-century data barons, he still was thinking too small, too locally about his information empire. It never occurred to him that billions of people globally might freely give up their most personal data. And he didn’t understand that there were much more scalable strategies for aggregating people’s photos than by disguising cameras inside watering cans.

No, to create a truly global crystal man, it wasn’t enough to put a hundred thousand spies on your payroll and have 39 million handwritten index cards. On the Internet, an electronic world of increasingly intelligent connected machines that Nicholas Carr calls a “Glass Cage,” there are billions of “gläserne Menschen.” And, it seems, they are all willing to work for free.

The Eyes of the Venetian

In Las Vegas, there isn’t a casino built around the theme of either East Germany or the Berlin Wall, surprisingly enough. But Las Vegas does possess one entertainment complex that pays homage to another of history’s great spying machines—the Venetian Republic, which, in its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century heyday, was notorious for its dense network of spies working for the State Inquisitors, a panel of judges that was a late medieval version of the Stasi. So it was serendipitous that a part of the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world’s largest event dedicated to networked consumer devices, was held in Las Vegas’s version of Venice—the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. Situated on Las Vegas’s strip, the Venetian, with its gaudily inauthentic piazzas and canals, represents a version of the Italian city-state that might be charitably described as augmented reality.

At CES 2014, surveillance technologies were, so to speak, on show throughout the Venetian. Companies were demonstrating networked cameras that could do everything from peeping under walls and peering around corners to peeking through clothing. It was like being at a conference for spooks. At the Indiegogo-sponsored section of the show, hidden in the bowels of the Venetian, one crowd-financed startup from Berlin named Panono was showing off what it called a “panoramic ball camera,” an 11 cm electronic ball with thirty-six tiny cameras attached to it, that took panoramic photos whenever the ball was thrown in the air and then, of course, distributed them on the network. Another Indiegogo company, an Italian startup called GlassUP, was demonstrating fashionably designed glasses that—like Google Glass—recorded everything they saw and provided what it called a “second screen” to check emails and read online breaking news. There were even “Eyes-On” X-ray style glasses, from a company called Evena Medical, that allowed nurses to see through a patient’s skin and spy the veins underneath. Just about the only thing I didn’t see in the Venetian were cameras hidden inside watering cans.

There were electronic eyes everywhere one looked. There was even an entire exhibition dedicated to intelligent eyeglasses. This “Retrospective Exhibition: 35 Years of Augmented Reality Eyewear,” a kind of history of the future, was held inside the “Augmented Reality Pavilion” in the Venetian. It featured row upon row of plastic heads, all wearing augmented glasses that had been developed over the last thirty-five years. The exhibition was sponsored by two of today’s leading developers of augmented glasses—an Israeli firm called OrCam, and Vuzix, whose $1,000 Smart Glasses M100 model, the world’s first commercially available networked eyewear, feature a hands-free camera that can record everything it sees. “Unforgettable” or “Public Eye” might have been more appropriate names for Vuzix’s creepy surveillance glasses.

“Welcome to Infinite Possibilities,” one banner hanging at the Venetian proclaimed in welcoming CES attendees. “Living in Digital Times: Connecting Life’s Dots,” another announced about a networked world in which the volume of data produced between 2012 and 2013 made up 90% of all the data produced in human history.
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In 2012, we produced 2.8 zettabytes of data, “a number that’s as gigantic as it sounds,” according to data expert Patrick Tucker, and by 2015 that number is expected to double to over 5.5 zettabytes. To put this into perspective, in 2009 all the content on the World Wide Web was estimated to have added up to about half a zettabyte of data.
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But, rather than
infinite
, the possibilities of most of the new electronic hardware at CES 2014 were really all the same. They were all devices greedy for the collection of networked data. These devices, some of which were being crowdfunded by networks like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, were designed to
connect our dots
—to know our movements, our taste, our physical fitness, our driving skills, our facial characteristics, above all where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going.

Wearable technology—what the Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in his keynote speech at the show called a “broad ecosystem of wearables”—dominated CES 2014. Sony, Samsung, and many, many startups were all demonstrating products that wouldn’t have been out of place at that old East German Ministry for State Security in Berlin. Two of the most hyped companies producing so-called quantified self products at CES were Fitbit, the maker of a wrist device that tracks physical activity and sleep patterns, and Swedish-based Narrative, the manufacturer of a wearable tiny camera clip designed to be worn on a lapel that automatically takes photos every thirty seconds and is known as a “lifelogging” device for recording everything it sees.

“What’s interesting about both companies is they make the invisible part of our lives visible, in an ambient ongoing fashion,” explained one venture capitalist who’d invested in Fitbit and Narrative.
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Thirty years ago, Mielke would have likely bought Narrative devices for the entire East German population. But today, the only bulk orders are likely to come from North Korea.

But it wasn’t just Fitbit and Narrative that were making the invisible visible. Everywhere at CES, companies were introducing surveillance products designed to spew our personal data. I judged a CES “hackathon” in which entrants innocently developed “innovative” new surveillance products, including hats and hoodies outfitted with sensor chips that instantly revealed the location of their wearer. A Canadian company, OMSignal, was demonstrating spandex clothing that wirelessly measured heart rate and other health data. Another smart clothing company, Heapsylon, even had a sports bra made of textile electrodes designed to monitor its wearer’s vital statistics.
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