We’ve grown used to thinking in big numbers in recent years, mainly of course, and regrettably, because of the vast levels of debt being carried by our country. So, we can easily absorb the news that biologists estimate that there are a quadrillion ants on earth. That’s a one with sixteen zeros… a lot of ants.

Sometimes on a summer’s evening in a garden (beer or otherwise) you might be forgiven for thinking they are all right there before you, billions of busy bastards, scuttling back and forwards, sometimes ferrying twigs and leaves that look proportionately as big as trees, always coming and going. They even farm aphids for the sweet stuff the aphids exude.
Gardeners watch them a lot but usually only turn on them when mounds of sand appear as the ants subvert patios and paths and house foundations. That’s when the war begins.
I was reminded both of vast numbers and ants when I heard about the scale of CIA and GCHQ surveillance of internet and phone traffic revealed by Edward Snowden. Like, we’re talking quadrillions of bugs, and no mistake.
Mostly what’s happening is comparable to those ants in the garden. It’s only those who are subverting the edifice that are really of interest, right? Well… maybe so, and a lot of people have shrugged their shoulders and carried on anting. But I doubt that anybody sane is comfortable with it. It marks a quantum jump towards a dark forbidding future, one in which the freedom to disagree and challenge and say what you think may be circumscribed as never before.
There’s a great paradox here. In their encounter with US Congress recently, US intelligence officials defended their surveillance of all possible communications on the grounds of national security and defending freedom…
Presumably potential threats include North Koreans and Islamic extremists, all of whom want to introduce a world where nobody thinks differently from how they are told to think and where dissidents are identified early and often and taken out asap. Like ants under the pavement. The more one looks, however, the more alike both sides become.
Of course, in his grudging acknowledgement that we have a problem, US Secretary of State John Kerry basically shrugged and said it’s just ants anting: that is, people doing it because they could, nothing to fear, sorry about that…
But the whole thing has provoked outrage. Notwithstanding the fact that their own intelligence agencies were often complicit in this wretched monitoring of their own citizens by a foreign state, some countries, such as Brazil, are now moving to create an indigenous internet, that is, to end the practice by which Brazilian internet traffic routinely passes through the US. If enough countries take this path it may kill the internet as we know it.
Would this have some serious repercussions? Would it fuck! And then some. I’ll tell you this, if I was a proponent of Big Data I’d be thinking of Plan B.
Of course, many of those most exercised by CIA and GCHQ raids on their privacy may not realise the degree to which their lives are already observed, tracked, logged and exploited.
Some of this is overt, almost old-fashioned. There are cameras all over the place and you’d be astonished at how much they pick up. The Hog was recently bemused to hear a man talk about the theft of goods from a warehouse in Limerick and how it was possible to track them to a building in Castlebar simply by following the thieves’ truck through streets and roundabouts.
And the level of such routine covert surveillance is about to excalate. The Gardai are set to increase the level of outsourced speed cameras. Coming to a street near you.
We’re also pretty familiar with the degree to which our personal behaviours can be tracked firstly through our use of credit and debit cards and secondly through our internet use and our engagement with social media. But we’re now entering a new era and, to a very large degree, it heralds the end of privacy. The new dispensation works at both the aggregate and personal levels.
The aggregate level is that vast traffic-flow trawled by the intelligence services. It also comprehends the Big Data espoused by internet evangelists and, by the way, the Irish Government. That’s where everything is processed and analysed. Not just security stuff but shopping patterns, behaviours, intentions… you name it. None of this will be for your good. It’s like watching the ants to see: where next for ants.
The second is at the level of the ants themselves. It used to be that you were trackable through Internet and your mobile and so on, but now it’s through so much more, especially your apps. And it’s not about where you go, it’s also about what you do when you’re there, about your tastes as well as your behaviours and soon enough it’ll be about your thoughts too. There is talk already of social media providers co-operating with police to intervene in thought-of crimes …
Now, maybe this doesn’t matter. I mean, nobody now fears the like of the News of the World publishing photos of people in their scanties because people publish them themselves on their social media pages.
But I think it does matter… a lot. We’re entitled to dissent. We’re entitled to idly speculate about things that might happen even when we’ve no intention of doing the happening. We’re entitled to decide whether we want to be herded and husbanded. However, the thing is, we live in a world where a lot of very powerful people reckon they’re the ants and we’re the greenfly and that being herded and husbanded is exactly what we’re for.
Think about it as you plan your billion dollar start-up strategy.