Now that it has become clear how our personal data is being harvested for espionage and profit, is Europe the last best hope for free people to regain control? For Le Monde, author and philosopher Eric Sadin outlines in detail how we got to this moment in history, what has gone wrong, and why it has now fallen to Europe to to ‘lay the foundations of a ‘Web 3.0’.
For Le Monde, Eric Sadin starts out this way:
Up to now, the United States has been the central power in the digital economy. Following innovations and products developed by IBM in the 1960s, which were later expanded upon by Microsoft and Apple, these creations were, at the turn of the millennium, the platform on which the “Internet giants” emerged – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and so many other companies. These firms were based on a new industrial model: the use of key words to search for information, sell products online, and the setting up of Web-based structured social networks. These were distinct activities that all converged on one strategic point: the harvesting and storage of personal data to be exploited by a multitude of commercial applications.
With continuous growth in the processing power of computers and data storage, combined with ever more sophisticated algorithms, an in-depth knowledge of our behavior has developed relentlessly over the past 15 years. The majority rule of free-of-charge information, on which the global success of the digital economy is based, has led to the large-scale electronic memorization via hard disks and server farms of the everyday acts of an incessantly increasing number of connected individuals.
Through an accident of history, the attacks of September 11 were committed during the still-uncertain formation of these unpredictable yet decisive technological and industrial developments. It was this radically-asymmetric aggression against the planet’s leading power by an “elusive, nebulous group,” that so contributed to putting intelligence operations at the forefront of politics, defense and homeland security policy. Based on a profound, in-depth knowledge of the largest number of people possible, amid this once-unsorted pile of information, it was now possible to seize on every potential plan for destruction contained within.
READ ON IN ENGLISH OR FRENCH, OR READ MORE TRANSLATED and English-language foreign press coverage as the NSA surveillance scandal continues to unfold at Worldmeets.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
Founder and Managing Editor of Worldmeets.US