Month: March 2023

Beating up on TikTok While Ignoring the Data Mining Business Model of Big Tech Based on Surveillance Capitalism

We begin with the hearing today before the House Energy and Commerce Committee at which the CEO of TikTok was aggressively grilled, with the Republican Chair announcing at the outset that TikTock should be banned, going on to say “To the American people watching today, hear this: TikTok is a weapon by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you, manipulate what you see and exploit for future generations.” Joining us is David Carroll, a professor of media design at the New School and director of its Design and Technology MFA program. He is known for legally challenging Cambridge Analytica and related companies in the UK courts to recapture his 2016 voter profile using European data protection law. Featured in the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, his work explores the intersections between media design, culture, policy, industry, and education, and his research examines major shifts in media as it relates to advertising, adtech, data rights, privacy, surveillance, social media, and journalism. We discuss the need to go beyond beating up on TikTok and look into the data-mining business models of the big tech companies like Facebook (Meta) which are based on surveillance capitalism.

Netanyahu’s Unreported Collusion to Elect Trump in 2016

 Then we investigate the unreported campaign conducted by Israel to influence the 2016 election to get Trump elected which involved Israeli agents working for Netanyahu who supplied the Trump campaign with information of the Russian hacks of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the DNC. Joining us is James Bamford, a bestselling author, Emmy-nominated filmmaker for PBS, award-winning investigative producer for ABC News, and winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his writing in Rolling Stone on the war in Iraq. He has also circumnavigated the surface of the earth, crossing every meridian of longitude by land and sea, and was elected to membership in the Explorers Club. James is the author of the bestselling books Body of Secrets, The Puzzle Palace, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, and The Shadow Factory: Inside the Ultra-Secret NSA, from 9/11 to Spying on America, and his latest book, just out, is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence. We discuss his article at The Nation, “The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel.”

Additional Spyfail excerpts at Business Insider and The Daily Beast