For Edward Snowden, big tech is making us live in the past

Last week, filmmaker Tonje Hessen released his artificial intelligence documentary "iHuman" at the IDFA festival in Amsterdam. As described in an article published by Variety, the 10 a.m. Sunday screening drew over 700 people interested in learning more about the subject that inspired the article's theme: the erosion of privacy in the age of new media and the frightening leaps being made in the field of machine intelligence. But beyond that, there was also a special detail at the end of the screening: a Q&A session with Edward Snowden.

Although Snowden is not in the documentary, his actions significantly changed the course of the events covered in the film's script. As the report on the Variety website describes, iHuman "is an almost exhausting journey through the problems Snowden was trying to warn us about, starting with our civil liberties." During the discussion, Snowden revealed that he really liked the film and that the subject matter was still quite new to him.

Writing his autobiography (Permanent Record) didn't make it any easier. "Actually, it's a huge challenge. I tried to avoid writing this book for a long time, but when I saw what was happening in the world and the direction of [technological] developments since I took my stand [in 2013], I started to be haunted by it—so much so that I began to consider: what is the cost of silence? And that is something I understand very well, given my experience. When you see the rise of authoritarianism, even in the West, in open societies, you see how close it is to the development of technology that creates stable states instead of free states. I think that should worry us, and that really encouraged me to do my work," Snowden revealed during his appearance at the screening.

Snowden also mentioned the changes in the nature of surveillance. Before 2013, he says, there were experts, insiders, intelligence agents, academics, and researchers who understood very well the possibility of a mass surveillance system. "They understood how our technologies and techniques could be applied to change the world of intelligence using a traditional method—which was that you name a target and then monitor them specifically. You send officers to their house, they plant cameras or listening devices. You have officers on the street who follow them to meetings, in cars, or on foot. And this created a natural constraint on how surveillance is generally done. Technological development has shown that, now, you can have individual officers who can easily monitor teams of people and even entire populations (entire movements, across borders, languages, and cultures) so cheaply that it happens overnight," the guest explained.

In this sense, Snowden expressed disdain for companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, or even Cambridge Analytica, which track our "digital footprints" and use algorithms to capture our attention. "What is happening is that we are being made prisoners of ghosts. We are being trapped by past behavioral models that have determined our machines. We are being used against our future. Our past actions and activities are being used to limit the potential of human behavior, because decisions are being formed based on past observations and these models of past lives," the expert argued.

To him, this type of information cannot be used for negative purposes. "It cannot be used to decide who gets a job, who can study, who gets a loan, who gets medical treatment. But if we don't change the direction we are heading in today, allowing Facebook, Google, and Amazon to continue following these models and applying them to all aspects of human decision-making (and they are very, very aggressively trying to do that today), we will find that we have become prisoners of a past that no longer exists."

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