I am not important enough to be paranoid

I am not important enough to be paranoid. In fact, I’m not important enough to pay attention to myself. I don’t even read the stuff I post online. Why should I? No one else does.

The idea that we are important enough to be under surveillance is really very amusing because no one ever asks the question: who is doing the watching?

The vast amount of information being collected on a daily basis is, we are told, being reviewed by artificial intelligence programs that are constantly sifting every piece of data and finding matches to the paradigms stored in their algorithms.

That’s great news, if you want a safe society. It’s terrible news if you want a free society, which is the conundrum we always face, the choice between security and freedom. It also isn’t true because those computer systems are overloaded with the influx of surplus information they are being fed.

Here’s the problem for that kind of wishful thinking. Not only is there too much information, but we are surveilling that information for too many triggers, too many phrases, too many financial transactions, too many documents, too many images…because, sooner or later, every single hit that is generated by these automated systems must be reviewed and evaluated by a human being.