CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The New Conquistadors: Surveillance Capitalism and the Digital Frontier Between Your Ears

There is a chapter in Edward Snowden’s memoir Permanent Record that receives less attention than it deserves—not the chapter about PRISM or XKeyscore or the Hong Kong hotel room, but the chapter describing what his colleagues actually did with all that power when nobody was watching, which, in a surveillance state, nobody ever is.

The program called XKeyscore is best understood as a search engine for the entirety of a person’s digital life. Type in a phone number, an email address, or an IP address, and you can read the emails, listen to the calls, and watch the browsing history unspool in real time—search queries appearing letter by letter as they were typed, what Snowden calls, with bleak precision, “a human complete.” The system was so comprehensive that Snowden realized he could have searched the communications of a Supreme Court justice or a sitting member of Congress with negligible risk of detection.

What his colleagues actually used this power for—what they found the system most reliably useful for in their day-to-day practice—was watching people they wanted to sleep with.

The practice had a name. The intelligence community, with its compulsive bureaucratic instinct to acronymize everything it touches, called it LOVEINT—a deliberate rhyme on HUMINT and SIGINT and, as Snowden notes, a gross joke on both. Analysts used XKeyscore, phone intercepts, camera feeds, everything, to monitor current lovers, ex-lovers, and objects of more casual affection. They read emails. They listened to calls. They looked at photographs. The NSA acknowledged the practice when pressed and characterized it as individual misconduct. It was nothing of the sort. It was endemic enough to have a name, widespread enough that the analysts Snowden worked alongside discussed it without apparent embarrassment, and protected by the same structural logic that protected every other abuse of the system: to prosecute an analyst for LOVEINT would require acknowledging in open court that the system being abused existed. The government would never do that. The analysts knew the government would never do that. The knowledge was shared, and the knowledge was itself a form of institutional permission.

“Intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency,” Snowden writes. The unspoken rule was that if you found a naked photograph or video of an attractive target, you showed the rest of the team—at least when there were no women present, a caveat that speaks volumes about how rare women were in these rooms. “That was how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.”

The atmosphere Snowden describes in vault V22 at NSA headquarters — decorated, let the detail stand, with a seven-foot poster of Chewbacca — is not the atmosphere of men who believe they are doing something wrong. It is the atmosphere of men who believe they are entitled. The technology did not corrupt them. It handed them a key.

This is the surveillance state at its most human, which is to say, its most revealing. The apparatus built to protect a democracy from its enemies was being used by young men to look at photographs of women who had no idea they were being watched. The technology did not create the entitlement. It removed the friction that previously constrained it.

Snowden describes the intelligence community of that era as crowded with men—technically credentialed, often very young, and operating within a culture that had developed a specific ideology to justify itself: the conviction that the analysts knew better than the citizens they were surveilling, that democracy’s ordinary protections were obstacles for the naive, and that the contractor badge conferred a kind of moral authority. XKeyscore was also a game—gamified with competitive logic that rewarded the most aggressive use. The citizen whose communications were being parsed was not a rights-bearing individual under the Fourth Amendment. They were content. Data. A score.

But the logic that made it possible — the conviction that the inner life of others is legitimately available to those with the technology to access it — does not stay in the vault. It travels. It goes private. It goes global. It gets productized, exported, and sold to governments that ask no questions and face no consequences. And it goes looking for deeper frontiers.

The NSO Group was founded by veterans of Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200. Pegasus, their flagship product, is a zero-click exploit: no link is clicked, no attachment is opened—a message arrives and the device is compromised, everything on it available to the operator. NSO marketed it as a counterterrorism tool. The gap between that description and its documented uses tells the story of the apparatus in miniature.

Saud al-Qahtani, senior adviser to Mohammed bin Salman, ran a troll army of Twitter bots and operators dubbed “the flies” by Saudi dissidents—their purpose to swarm critics, amplify regime propaganda, and manufacture the appearance of popular support for a government with no legitimate means of generating it. Before tuning in via Skype to oversee the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, al-Qahtani’s portfolio included running social media operations for the royal court. Khashoggi and Montreal-based dissident Omar Abdulaziz built a counter-network they called the Bees, designed to amplify independent voices, the flies were working to drown out. By 2018, the Bees were gaining traction. In 2018, Khashoggi was asked to visit the Saudi consulate in Istanbul for routine paperwork for his upcoming marriage. He entered on October 2nd. He did not come out. Whole.

After his death, investigators discovered that Pegasus had compromised Abdulaziz’s phone before the murder. The communications between them — their planning for the Bees, their discussions of the consulate visit, their assessments of MBS’s likely responses — had been available to Saudi intelligence in real time. The flies had been watching the Bees all along. Monitoring, swarming, and killing were not separate departments. They were consecutive........

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