Gabriel Andrade, Isabel Paez, Natalia Cabrera, Sergio Mora
An installation made to remind us that we are being watched.
Description
In our post 9/11 world, tradeoffs have been made behind the scenes to grant government agencies access to an unprecedented amount of its citizens’ personal data, under the guise of national security. We have woken up to a new reality whereby the U.S. government’s programs such as PRISM are arguably more powerful and invasive than those used by the Stasi, (‘secret state security service’) which spied on the citizens of communist East Germany in the last century. It is a chilling comparison, however the NSA has managed to collect a billion times more data in a decade than the Stasi collected in nearly half a century. This includes domestic calls, cell phone location records, and Internet data. Specifically, companies such as Facebook or Google have been providing information about you, including what you search for, who you talk to, and even your what your daily commute looks like.
With the implementation of the Patriot Act, we have unwittingly traded privacy and intellectual freedom for the promise of security. As this practice becomes the new normal, the masses have been subject to an erosion of democracy and civil liberties. Despite the fact that government collection of metadata has been deemed unconstitutional by a U.S. federal judge.
Had it not been for Edward Snowden’s actions as a NSA whistleblower, citizens throughout the world would remain in the dark about what truly goes on. Still, many of us will never comprehend the extent of personal information that is seamlessly tracked, collected and stored on us and how that information could be misused or even abused.
Classes
Basic Analog Circuits