The rise of e-commerce, and the soft addictive allure of social media, rapidly transforms U. While secrecy shrouds our understanding of these relationships, CIA history provides examples of some ways that intelligence operations have supported and informed past U. The NSA is not the only government-based international hacking unit spying on global competitors.
Yet the leveraging of such information is a fundamental feature of market capitalism. Many countries cannot say the same. There are many historical examples of intelligence personnel using information acquired through the course of their work for personal gain, such as selling intelligence information to another power. But what we need to focus upon is a qualitatively different phenomenon: Retired CIA agent Kim Roosevelt then running a multinational consulting firm operating in Saudi Arabia denied any involvement in these bribes, but the investigation uncovered documents establishing that Roosevelt used his CIA connections for financial gain.
The most rigorous study to date documenting intelligence data being used for economic gains in stock market trading was recently published by economists Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu.
Enlisting the Social Sciences
The authors developed empirical measures to determine whether classified knowledge of impending CIA operations has historically been used to generate profits in this manner. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu recognized that most regimes historically overthrown by CIA coups had nationalized industries that were once privately held by international corporations; post-coup these industries returned to the previous corporate owners. Therefore, foreknowledge of upcoming coups had a significant financial value in the stock market.
The authors developed a series of measures to detect whether, during past CIA coups, there were detectible patterns of stock trading taking advantage of classified intelligence directives, which were known only to the CIA and President. Their study selected only CIA coups with now declassified planning documents, which attempted to install new regimes, and in which the targeted pre-coup governments had nationalized once-private multinational industries. They sampled five of twenty-four identified covert CIA coups meeting these three criteria: Daily stock returns of companies that had been nationalized by the governments targeted by CIA coups were used to compare financial returns before presidential coup authorizations and after the coups.
Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu found that four days after the authorization of coups their sample of stocks rapidly rose before public awareness of these coming secret coups: The Guatemala stocks showed a 4. The presence of these abnormal returns suggests that there were leaks of classified information to asset traders. While Snowden released documents and stated that more will be forthcoming indicating NSA surveillance of corporations around the world, we do not understand how the NSA puts to use the intelligence they collect. Even with these leaks the NSA largely remains a black box, and our knowledge of its specific activities are limited.
Enlisting the Social Sciences | AAUP
Notions of privacy and surveillance are always culturally constructed and are embedded within economic and social formations of the larger society. Some centralized state-socialist systems, such as the USSR or East Germany, developed intrusive surveillance systems, an incessant and effective theme of anti-Soviet propaganda.
The democratic-socialist formations, such as those of contemporary northern Europe, have laws that significantly limit the forms of electronic surveillance and the collection of metadata, compared to Anglo-U.
We need a theory of surveillance that incorporates the political economy of the U. Such analysis needs an economic foundation and a view that looks beyond cultural categories separating commerce and state security systems designed to protect capital. The metadata, valuable private corporate data, and fruits of industrial espionage gathered under PRISM and other NSA programs all produce information of such a high value that it seems likely some of it will be used in a context of global capital.
It matters little what legal restrictions are in place; in a global, high-tech, capitalist economy such information is invariably commodified. It is likely to be used to: The rise of new invasive technologies coincides with the decline of ideological resistance to surveillance and the compilation of metadata. In a world where the CIA can hack the computers of Senator Feinstein—a leader of the one of the three branches of government—with impunity or lack of public outcry, it is difficult to anticipate a deceleration in the pace at which NSA and CIA expand their surveillance reach.
To live a well-adjusted life in contemporary U. Like all things in our society, we can expect these intrusions will themselves be increasingly stratified, as electronic privacy, or illegibility, will increasingly become a commodity available only to elites. Following the Second World War, many European nations reconfigured long-distance billing systems to not record specific numbers called, instead only recording billing zones—because the Nazis used phone billing records as metadata useful for identifying members of resistance movements.
Following the Arab Spring, Tunisia now reconfigures its Internet with a new info-packet system known as mesh networks that hinder governmental monitoring—though USAID support for this project naturally undermines trust in this system. Some future crisis may well provide similar opportunities to regain now lost contours of privacies.
Yet hope for immediate change remains limited.
It will be difficult for social reform movements striving to protect individual privacy to limit state and corporate surveillance. From Nader, he acknowledges, we have been taught to study up and confront power. More, as Weaponizing Anthropology proves an example of, Nader tells us that this means that we will have to work harder than those aligned with power. In Price's up-front analysis, the powerful are the social scientists behind the Human Terrain program of the US armed forces who have adapted should I say abducted?
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As Price shows beyond any doubt, their ambitions are intellectually soiled, representing a kind of anthropology that without self-insight is a bad version of the obsolete cataloguing exercises of George Peter Murdock and the like-minded. Moreover, the Human Terrain anthropologists have the power, backed by secrecy and military might, to ignore the usual academic standards of peer-review, critical reflection, and intellectual openness.
In short, they are as intellectually closed as the societal and cultural descriptions they present. At the same time, military people today claim the role as global humanitarians. Here the Human Terrain program is seen as merely a tool in the global war on terror, with mainstream US media acting as "cheerleaders for the program" In the process, ethical research standards as we have come to know them no longer exist.
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Torture has been accepted by the powerful as they set out to defend Western liberal democracy, but also, it seems, as a tool in the very production of ethnographic data. In the war-zone, the Human Terrain proponents say, the anthropologist has to finish his interview within no more than seven minutes, before sniper attacks can be expected. Price exposes real ethical and political consequences for anthropology, and in his critical assessment he revisits well-known anthropological debates.
Even if the colonial legacy in anthropology has been discussed endlessly, Price's work proves this to be perhaps more important than ever. But such a program is not only ethically indefensible and politically questionable.
It is also epistemologically faulty, as Price shows, because it is an anthropological program that "creates something misshapenly Frankenstinean" A rich history of anthropological thought, debate, and controversy is glossed over as something completely homogenous, a manual set for use, and in the process "profound epistemological differences" are "cannibalized" Anthropology becomes a monster, and Price expends quite some effort in identifying the intellectual roots for this monstrous project. Even with well-respected, old-time anthropologists, Price can delineate how the Human Terrain anthropologists not only misrepresent their thoughts, but many do it in ways that are pure plagiarism.
No references are given, context is removed, and the usual peer-review process is made nearly impossible.