Big Brother’s in Your Pocket
Your smartphone is your enemy. Yes, that cute little sidekick you carry around is a vicious snitch that does more than monitor your every movement and purchase. The handy device continuously reports back to a vast government-controlled computer network that can swoop down to punish you for any behavior disapproved of by omnipresent Big Brother.
It won’t be long before most smartphones are equipped with a variant of Touch ID. That’s the fingerprint-identification feature Apple Inc. acquired with its purchase of AuthenTec, a spin-off from the Harris Corporation, a mammoth Pentagon contractor. How convenient that technology developed by the NSA and other surveillance agencies is now made available to Americans to facilitate government spying on them.
Apple’s introduction of Touch ID only seals the deal. But even before that totalitarian fantasy became a reality, the pervasive reliance on smartphones for all of our activities—even the most intimate—spelled the final end of any significant remaining private space.
