In Trump's America, TV Watches You

Companies and agencies are spying on everyone they can.

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Our episode this week gathers a series of recent surveillance scandals, in which everything from public cameras to your AI agent and even your television may be monitoring you. To put the current snooping in context, Andrea Pitzer looks at the history of mass political surveillance. In the Nazi era, Heinrich Himmler dreamed of having five men to track every individual suspect. East Germany hired or co-opted more than one in seven citizens to spy. And the U.S. has its own history on this front, with a massive surveillance operation put into place during the civil rights era, with the goal of targeting Black Activists, Native Americans, and feminists.

In the modern era, Andrea notes that governments often have willing partners in tech companies, using tools that far surpass twentieth-century capabilities. Corporations are typically more interested in collecting data to increase their bottom line, while governments want surveillance to secure power and target public opposition. But in the end, companies are prone to collaborating with governments, especially if they can profit from it—even if doing so lets law enforcement take unethical or illegal actions. The problem of tech and AI isn't that they're aware or human (they're not). From China to the US, the real threat is the oligarchs and aspiring dictators who would happily eliminate our freedom for another dollar or an ounce of power.

00:00 Introduction and Recent Tech Surveillance

02:55 The Fallibility of AI and Stolen Discoveries

05:10 Human Contractors and Data Privacy

07:20 Historical Precedents of Authoritarian Surveillance