American surveillance state now going totalitarian: Researcher

People have voluntarily entered into a surveillance state that will lead to totalitarianism in the United States, an American political analyst and researcher has said.

In a recent update, WhatsApp has demanded users to share their data with Facebook. The encrypted messaging app is famous for the privacy services it offers, but now pressuring users to give Facebook access to their personal data, Digital Information World has reported.

This update was sent to users last week with a short deadline that users have to accept the update and allow Facebook and its partners to obtain user’s data. WhatsApp is actually demanding as a condition of use for people to surrender their personal data.

Former congressional staffer Rodney Martin told Press TV in an interview on Monday said that this “is very troubling, yes but it's also just an additional step in the development of the surveillance and totalitarian state that the United States has been becoming.”

“People think they live in a democracy or a constitutional republic with all sorts of freedom, then they realize that the government regardless of the Constitution that people have privacy in their affairs and in the papers knows everything about them,” he stated.

“I mean, this goes from WhatsApp which I did notice says that all of the conversations are going to be stored. So that means anything you study on WhatsApp becomes property of Facebook and it's shared across a broader spectrum. While the front story for this is to assist in advertising I firmly believe that the actual motivation is to provide a privatized backup internal surveillance agency for the United States government because we hear that there are still pesky constitutional provisions that bind the government,” Martin stated.

“People are always quick to say that private corporations can do whatever they want and sadly in the United States even those on the left who rail against corporations support that very concept so they're not very consistent, and of course, those on the right had no druthers about such surveillance. Some of them may grumble now because it affects them,” he said.  

“But this is going to cut across the entire spectrum of social media and big tech. People should think about those people that have Amazon Alexa, or Google Home speakers in their houses, which they can voice command various appliances or ask questions. Those speakers are probably always on and recording every conversation and every interaction in people's homes. People should immediately tear those out. Likewise, these Cloud operations are operated by Google, by Amazon for the purposes of providing a much larger storage venue for people's data in the Cloud. They should immediately delete what's in there. That might not be Tuesdays. I'm sure they say that but then disconnect from those services as well,” he noted.

“People have voluntarily entered into a surveillance state that will lead to totalitarianism in both the EU, Great Britain, and the United States and they've done it willingly under the auspice of the convenience of being able to do things more conveniently, which is quite troubling,” he said.

“I have long predicted the United States was prone to go the way of the Soviet Union breakup. And this could be one additional step in that direction as people begin to wake up if they do to the fact that they are being surveilled on a scale much larger, much grander, much more intimately than anything that East German Stasi or the Soviet KGB ever did,” he concluded.

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