Rastreabilidade eletrônica de Latour (2007) a Snowden (2019)

Em Permanent record, Edward Snowden reitera:

All you wanted to do was to read — to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the world needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers across every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store for perpetuity the data of your life. […] And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, or “exploits,” they developed the ability to gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device, including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now — this sentence — on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. And they’ll gladly endure looking up your nostrils and watching you move your lips as you read, so long as it gets them the data they want and lets them positively identify you. […] This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation — the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book. (Snowden 2019:248-9)

O que faz lembrar o texto “Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces”, que Bruno Latour publicou em 2007, e no qual alertava:

Imagination no longer comes as cheaply as it did in the past. The slightest move in the virtual landscape has to be paid for in lines of code. […] [T]he scale to draw is not one going from the virtual to the real, but a scale of increasing traceability. The stunning innovation is that every click […] may be gathered in a data bank and submitted to a second-degree data-mining operation. (Latour 2007)

Referências
LATOUR, Bruno. 2007. Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces. A piece for the Times Higher Literary Supplement 6th of April.
SNOWDEN, Edward. 2019. Permanent record. London Macmillan.

Relacionados:

Matéria e sentido (Barad 2007) Como pensam as instituições? (Douglas 1986) Mediação técnica (Latour 1994) O nooscópio de Pasquinelli e Joler Vida eletrônica em McLuhan (1994 [1964])