Courtesy of Pam Martens
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Testifies Before Congress on April 10, 2018
It’s time to ask this question: is Facebook wearing the friendly façade of a social media company while actually operating as a high tech citizen surveillance center? We’ll get to that in a moment, but first a look at what an actual citizen surveillance center looks like in New York City.
In 2012 we broke the story that the intrepid CBS investigative program, 60 Minutes, had aired a fawning piece on the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. That center is a high tech surveillance center built with over $150 million in taxpayers’ money that uses thousands of spy cameras owned by Wall Street banks together with thousands more owned by the New York City Police Department to spy on millions of law-abiding citizens in lower Manhattan. Data feeds from the cameras are routed to a central computer in the center where individuals can be zoomed in on and tracked without a warrant for probable cause.
We called out 60 Minutes in our article for being aware, but failing to report, that the surveillance center was being staffed with security officials from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase along with NYPD officers. (All three of the mega Wall Street banks were heavily implicated in the frauds that led to the epic financial collapse of 2008. Citigroup and JPMorgan pleaded guilty to criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Justice Department in later years for financial crimes unrelated to the collapse.)
In a 2006 report on the lower Manhattan camera surveillance network, the New York Civil Liberties Union noted that “Today’s surveillance camera is not merely the equivalent of a pair of eyes. It has super human vision. It has the capability to zoom in and ‘read’ the pages of the book you have opened while waiting for a train in the subway.” The report further explained that “New York City has a long and troubled history of police surveillance of individuals and groups engaged in lawful political protest and dissent. Between 1904 and 1985 the NYPD compiled some one million intelligence files on more than 200,000 individuals and groups — suspected communists, Vietnam War protesters, health and housing advocates, education reform groups, and civil rights activists.” Indeed, the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center came in handy during the Occupy Wall Street protests.
What this Orwellian public-private partnership is doing with surveillance in the bowels of lower Manhattan is not that different from what Facebook is doing on a dramatically larger scale from its sprawling campus in Menlo Park, California.
…
