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There is no more private life. We are being watched. We were convinced of this from our own experience in the spring, at the height of the pandemic, when permits were introduced in the cities and full control over our movements was exercised. Each of our steps, if desired, can become known to “interested persons”. The high-profile spy cases of recent years only confirm this. Why don’t we care?
Imagine that the walls of your house have become transparent. And everyone around you can see your every step and hear your every word. Represented? Now understand that this is actually the case. And decide how to live with it.
Last summer in one of the suburbs of New York there was an instructive story. Michelle Catala-no, a housewife and freelance journalist, decided to buy a pressure cooker. And her husband just at the same moment needed a new backpack. They did what everyone would have done in their place: they began to look for options on the Internet. Michelle searched from home, her husband from work. A short time later, three black minivans pulled up to their house. Several groups of armed men went around the building from different sides, taking aim at windows and doors. After that, the unexpected guests invited the hosts to slowly come to the threshold with their hands up.
The guests turned out to be members of the counter-terrorism unit. It was not difficult for the intelligence services to find out that simultaneous searches on Google for a pressure cooker and a backpack were carried out, although from different computers, but by members of the same family. This was enough to send a capture team: a few months earlier, explosions had thundered in Boston. The organizers of the terrorist attack, the Tsarnaev brothers, built bombs from pressure cookers and carried them to the marathon in backpacks …
Big brother eye
This story is not about the vigilance of the secret services, it is about the private life of any of us. A life that is no more. Any search query, status on a social network or downloaded file is not a secret and sooner or later can be used against us. I asked a friend in the chat where to buy Nurofen without a prescription – a drug user. I downloaded a song – a computer pirate. In the heat of the moment, he wrote something on Facebook about a negligent Tajik janitor – a racist. I decided to surprise my beloved and went to explore the site of a sex shop – a maniac.
Dignity develops with age, provided that parents help the child gradually expand their personal space.
Edward Snowden’s revelations leave no doubt that intelligence agencies know (or can find out) about what we say and do on the Internet. The same data can certainly be obtained by large corporations and capable hackers. And if desired, they are all able to discover what we protect from the Internet. The arsenal of spyware is so great that stealing photos or documents stored there from any computer connected to the Web is a matter of technology, and no antivirus will become an obstacle.
And there are also surveillance cameras that are equipped with offices, entrances, metro stations. Information from them flows to computers that are also connected to the Internet. And how, then, can we be sure that no one is watching us at this very second? By the way, both video monitors for monitoring babies, which wealthy parents love to install at home, and built-in laptop cameras can also be used by unknown “well-wishers”. George Orwell’s prophecy has come true: Big Brother is watching us. Listens to us, reads, studies correspondence, addictions, contacts. How to live with it?
All-seeing Prism
On June 6, 2013, the Guardian and Washington Post published reports on the government’s Prism intelligence program. Edward Snowden, a former employee of the US National Security Agency, provided information to journalists. According to already confirmed data, the world’s largest companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and YouTube, actively cooperated with the special services. All of them reported information about their users not only in the US, but also in other countries of the world. Thus, our e-mail messages, publications on social networks, contact lists, documents stored on the computer, and audio and video files were available to the special services. The Prism program also authorized wiretapping and recording of telephone conversations.
“We do not care”
“Private life is, first of all, the need for one’s own space,” explains clinical psychologist Yakov Kochetkov. – It is inherent not only to people, but also to many social animals. Even in a flock of monkeys, there are social masks that everyone must wear. It is all the more important to have your own space where you can take off the mask and be yourself at least for a while. The invasion of privacy deprives us of this opportunity and inevitably causes stress.
The stress this spring really happened serious. Now, in order to leave the house, it was necessary to report this to the appropriate authorities, although everyone knows that without the introduction of a state of emergency in the country, every citizen has the right to leave the house and go wherever he wants. What was our reaction? The Internet community did not sound the alarm, human rights activists did not prepare lawsuits, and sociologists did not measure the degree of discontent of citizens, since there is nothing to measure. Does that mean we don’t care about privacy?
Not at all, says psychoanalyst Tatyana Rebeko. The point is in the peculiarities of the national character: we live in constant stress, feeling that our privacy is violated at every step. And this happens because the “privacy zone” of a Russian person is much wider. “We are not ready to communicate on any topic, we are reluctant to even share the names of our favorite films and books with strangers,” notes Tatyana Rebeko. But for the same reason, information about total control over the Internet does not add anything new to our picture of the world.
Another explanation is the history of our country. “We discussed the problems of intimate life at party meetings,” recalls Yakov Kochetkov. – Several generations lived in a totalitarian state that did not allow any private life. Not so long ago, my friend bought an apartment, began to make repairs – and discovered “bugs” left over from Soviet times. It didn’t come as a surprise. We are too accustomed to being watched to worry about confirmation of this fact.
How to become “opaque”?
Ways to counter computer espionage are well known. Do not open email messages from unknown addresses, do not follow dubious links, do not download files to your computer if you are not 100% sure of their origin and content, create two mailboxes for yourself and use one for personal correspondence, and the second for online registration. But the main thing is not to reveal too much about yourself.
“The information that you report about yourself on the Web should be treated like a tattoo,” advises psychologist Yakov Kochetkov. – She can look very beautiful on a young body. But it would be nice to think about how the tattoo will look in many years, when the skin and muscles become less elastic. In other words, you need to be old enough and set the boundaries of private life, clearly realizing the possible consequences of your own openness.
Return dignity
“We knew that everything was under the hood”, “just think, news” … There is some ostentatious cynicism in such a reaction. By resorting to it, we unconsciously deny the value that is grossly violated by the very fact of surveillance. And this value is personal dignity, says psychologist Yevgeny Osin: “Dignity does not exist by default. A newborn has no privacy: he is completely dependent on his mother, who wipes his saliva and changes diapers.
Dignity develops with age, but only on the condition that parents help the child gradually expand their personal space. And if they keep drooling on him at 10 and 15 years old, they deprive him of that opportunity. The same thing happens when the functions of a strict but caring parent are taken over by the state or a social group. Man remains a social individual and does not develop further. He successfully plays a social role, but has almost no sphere of his own, does not become a personality.
We are the authors of our life, and everyone has unsuccessful pages in it.
It would seem that young people who have not found a totalitarian state should value privacy more. But young Internet users in Russia not only do not go to anti-surveillance rallies, but with surprising nonchalance continue to report information on the Web that should not be shared. I recently came across a post on Facebook by a young niece of a friend of mine. Having received a new passport, she laid out its first page – with a photo, number, signature and all other data.
Many girls (and boys, too) post their photos in the nude – to increase self-esteem, find a partner, show off their looseness. “The dignity of a person does not directly depend on the influence of the environment. And a change in external circumstances does not mean automatic changes in us, says Evgeny Osin. “Much more significant is the influence of adults who pass on to the child ways of dealing with the world.”
Respect your shortcomings
But what about the fact that so much about us is already known to strangers, with whom we did not intend to “get closer” at all? Abandon the Internet at all? According to the British The Daily Mail (whose information, however, always requires careful verification), 11 million users have recently deleted their Facebook accounts precisely because their privacy was available to outsiders. Well, the next step is to give up the phone (they will listen) and the computer (they will hack). Then hoods, goggles and masks will be used – so that security cameras do not recognize us …
“One should not overestimate the importance of one’s own person,” Yakov Kochetkov believes. “The number of emails and publications is in the billions, and no intelligence agency reads them all. Message browsing algorithms respond to keywords. And if you are not planning a terrorist attack and are not discussing the supply of heroin, your conversations are unlikely to be of interest to the state. Therefore, concern for privacy should not develop into paranoia: no matter how wide the possibilities of surveillance are, it is impossible to follow everyone and always, and there is no point in this.
Tatyana Rebeko has her own answer to the question of how not to be afraid of an invasion of privacy. “Live in such a way that there is nothing to be afraid of,” she says. No, none of us is an angel, but that’s not the case. “I have met people who have an inner core more than once,” says Tatiana Rebeko. – Their main secret is that they are open to the world and treat themselves very respectfully, appreciating their own shortcomings as well. We are the authors of our life, and everyone has unsuccessful pages in it. The main thing is to recognize that our life is not limited to them. In this case, any revelations of past secrets make keyhole peepers look stupid, not those they are peeping at.”