The 2010's: D is for Data Wars (First Published 2019)

For everyone from hacktivists, spy agencies, electoral campaigners and rogue states, the 2010’s was the decade when big data became a vital geopolitical tool. Has the open secret that ‘privacy is dead’ numbed us to the threats to our democracy?

“Scientia potentia est”- Knowledge is power.

The phrase first made an appearance in the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ famous work Leviathan, in 1651. Hobbes first outlined the idea of the social contract in Leviathan, arguing that in order to ensure peace and security for everyone, all citizens must surrender a portion of their rights to the sovereign. The state in turn is expected to exercise the full extent of its resources to provide stability, with little need to conform to expectations of personal freedom or privacy. In the 1650’s, Hobbes had used the idea of a social contract to justify an all-powerful state for a country who had just put the Divine Right of Kings on the chopping block, but had yet to develop a truly democratic society. In Hobbes’ view, even if people weren’t ruled by a monarch, the state should nevertheless be absolute, and in sole possession of the knowledge required to exercise power.

The knowledge the State needed to ensure national security in the mid-17th Century may have been a world away from what it has required in the 2010’s, but the cold truth that knowledge begets power has barely changed at all. As data has become more valuable than any other resource, it’s power to undermine democratic institutions whilst turbo-charging the erosion of individual privacy has been overwhelming.

We can be confident that Hobbes would have little sympathy with the actions of people like Edward Snowden, who has a very different view on how much knowledge, and power, the state should possess. In 2013 the former NSA employee leaked classified information showing that the agency had, in partnership with the USA’s allies and numerous telecom giants, conducted data surveillance on millions of Americans. As well as gaining access to countless Google and Yahoo accounts, certain NSA analysts were able to use a system called XKeyscore to conduct almost unlimited surveillance of anyone, anywhere in the world with an online profile.

Like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning before him, Snowden’s whistleblowing was hailed as heroism in some quarters whilst condemned as treason in others. But it seemed for most people, the news that the US Government had perfected personal surveillance was only greeted with an indifferent shrug.

Many of those who were nonplussed by the unprecedented powers of the government to reach into our private lives might have found solace in the old adage that those with nothing to fear have nothing to hide. Back in 2013, this seemed like the only logical response. Intensive CCTV surveillance had been part and parcel of urban life for years, but was only utilised on an individual basis to counteract crime. Besides, no one seriously believed that actual government employees were sifting through their texts and emails, systems like XKeystore were only of use to those chasing terrorists and drug traffickers, our privacy was still, in effect, safe.

But our acceptance of this benign Leviathan in the 2010’s may have proved disastrous. Whilst national security and essentially harmless advertisements are one thing, when this information is used to manipulate the political process, democracy itself is fundamentally altered.

During the 2016 US Election, Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, had boasted that his company had managed to obtain from Facebook over 5000 unique data points on every American voter. The Trump Campaign’s partnership with Nix allowed them to intensively target and advertise to “swing voters”, enough of them to change the result of the election, based entirely on information they didn’t consent to be shared.

The same has been true of Brexit, as well as elections and referenda all across the developing world. The sheer scale of information we have readily made available to companies such as Facebook, Google and their shadowy ‘partners’ has almost rendered the principle of the secret ballot obsolete, their algorithms cut through everything. The voter, the citizen, the individual, what power can these entities realistically expect to wield when all their most vital perspectives and intuitions are mapped out on a spreadsheet by an advertising platform’s supercomputer?

Democracy in the 2010’s has proved far too slow to answer that question. Cambridge Analytica may have collapsed in 2018, but their methods are now common practice across all the modern industrialised democracies. This is the data miner’s world now, we’re all just voting in it.

And that world may be a dystopian one for the democrat, but it’s a veritable goldmine for the state. Forget nuclear weapons, central banks and overbearing federal agencies, the real strength of the modern government is just how easily it can tap into the most intimate minutiae of our social lives, with every microtransaction and relationship perfectly accounted for in its digital footprint. The tendrils of the modern leviathan have their grip on all the information our smartphones, laptops and contactless cards bleed into the world every single day.

The political leverage one can extract from that information is immeasurable. Whether or not you believe that the meddling hand of Moscow had a role to play real estate magnate Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the Oval Office, there is no denying that Russia is one of many rogue states trying to leverage big data for geopolitical aims. The Kremlin’s security agencies have operated a small army of anonymous bloggers to flood the blogosphere and Twittersphere with untruths, playing into the hands of Putin's geopolitical ambitions.

China, whose military have just been caught red-handed breaking into an American credit agencies database and stealing a jackpot of personal data, also have form in this. In 2010, they used Google to go after human rights activists. In 2014, they targeted some of America’s largest businesses, and in 2015, the U.S government’s entire payroll was put at risk by a Chinese hack.

The great philosophical movers and shakers of the Enlightenment, who first conceptualised the idea of modern democracy, could not have conceived of the vast changes that technology has brought to the world in the last decade. Consequently, our 18th Century democratic institutions are exhausted, looking evermore stretched and vulnerable in the face of big data’s threats to its vital organs.

But democracy is inherently flexible, the voter, the journalist and the campaigner have all found ways to adapt in the past when threatened by the pace of change. But in a decade where the political world has developed at an unprecedented speed, democracy’s institutions, and its citizens, will need to move quicker to catch-up with the Data leviathan.