The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

CIA Director Michael Hayden conceded as much in 2013 when he told an audience that in the years following 9/11, the CIA “could be fairly charged with the militarization of the world wide web.”65 Legislation to regulate online privacy was an immediate casualty. Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), testified to the 9/11 Commission on the sudden reversal of privacy concerns, observing that before 9/11, “There was hardly any positive discussion about the development of techniques that would enable massive surveillance while attempting to safeguard privacy.”66 Swire concurred, noting that as a result of the new emphasis on information sharing, “Congress lost interest in regulating information usage in the private sector.… Without the threat of legislation, the energy went out of many of the self-regulatory efforts that industry had created.”67 At the FTC, the focus shifted from the broader concerns of privacy rights to a more politically palatable “harms-based” strategy, pursuing cases in which concrete physical harms or economic injuries could be defined, such as identify theft or database security.