The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

During these years, scholars noted the growing interdependencies between the intelligence agencies, resentful of constitutional constraints on their prerogatives, and the Silicon Valley firms.86 The agencies craved the lawlessness that a firm such as Google enjoyed. In his 2008 essay “The Constitution in the National Surveillance State,” law professor Jack Balkin observed that the Constitution inhibits government actors from high-velocity pursuit of their surveillance agenda, and this creates incentives for the government “to rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it.”87 Balkin noted that the Supreme Court has imposed few privacy restrictions on business records and information that people give to third parties. E-mail is typically held in private servers, making its protection “limited if not nonexistent.” This absence of law made private companies attractive partners for government actors bound to democratic constraints.