During the Vietnam War, defense department money was poured into targeting technology and number-crunching machines, which evolved into today's silicon microchip. The fashionable answer is that technology can be whatever we want it to be, that optimism is the only way forward. Systematic critiques smell too much of Marxism. But you don't have to believe that capitalism is inherently flawed to see that technology's promise to liberate often falls short, and that when the market gets its hand on military tech it acts very much like it's operating in the war-time paradigms of communication, command, and control. Between the way RealNetworks tracks audio downloads, and Microsoft embeds tracers in every Word document, to name just two examples, the market has developed a highly sophisticated surveillance apparatus.
Spy tech is such a growth industry that it's expanding at double-digit rates every year.
Only a few decades old, it already gave us the first baron with political aspirations in Ross Perot, whose Electronic Data Security financed the launch of the Reform Party. In Canada, there's a robust market emerging for consumer encryption that was previously only available to governments. The spooks of the future will not be using wire-taps, they'll just put in a call to Citibank. So the real reason the Valley thinks the CIA has no business in surveillance may be that that market is already locked up tight by private firms. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show just how enmeshed in surveillance the private sector already is.