#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) Italy, Catania, Galatea FAI: The control of reproduction in surveillance capitalism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 It is now a fact that we live in a surveillance society. When fifteen years old

the pervasiveness of digital control was pointed out, they were held up as
apocalyptics. In recent years, however, mass surveillance has been accepted in
public discourse and recognized as a natural fact. ---- And as in front of all
facts perceived as natural, many@ simply react with a mixture of resignation
and/or defense of the status quo: "perhaps being constantly monitored is not nice
but you want to put the convenience of having Netflix which do you offer me films
that I will statistically like?". ---- Surveillance remains an abstract theme
until something nasty happens. It is the others who suffer the repressive aspects
of surveillance. The subversives, the foreigners, the enemy.

Then, one day, the Supreme Court of the United States of America reminds us that
legality is a matter of power relations and not of natural rights: the long wave
of the conservative comeback that began at the end of the 70s finally manages to
undermine the sentence Roe vs. Wade and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. The IVG is
no longer subject to federal protection and each federal state can legislate on it.

We will not go into the examination of the sentence, which refers to interesting
and much more complex themes than what is thought in the common imaginary on the
USA present in Western Europe; we will limit ourselves to talking about some
consequences of this fact.

Over the last few years, access to IVG has been increasingly restricted in the
most conservative states of the USA. But until the decision of the Supreme Court
a certain level of access had to be - however - guaranteed. When this - very weak
- guarantee failed, the states governed by conservative elites proceeded to ban
the IVG tout court. This has made it possible to open criminal investigations
against patients who resort to IVG and healthcare personnel who practice it.

The opening of criminal proceedings allows the authorities to request access to
the data holders. Thus it happens that a girl from Nebraska and her mother are in
court: the first for having aborted in the 28th week, the second for having
procured abortion drugs for her daughter and for helping to hide the aborted
fetus. Part of the procedure is based, for the tests, on chats that took place on
messenger between the young woman and other subjects @.

But the question is much more complex and transcends the specific case. The
paradigm of accumulation of value through surveillance is based on collecting
data and putting it to value. There is no magic. Nothing more and - above all -
nothing less: any data is good to be collected, analysed, categorized, sold or
used to sell. It has been common practice for years for Alphabet, known to most
as Google, to carry out these operations on any event that occurs in its
ecosystem that it offers: mail, space navigation services, search engine, data
backup, video entertainment, cloud workspaces . The same thing is done by Meta,
or the conglomerate that manages Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp. And on
the analysis services of these companies or other similar ones that offer data
investigation platforms such as IBM or Amazon, thousands of mobile applications
are based used for any. The "any" also includes apps that allow you to track
menstrual cycles.

Having systems that can aggregate and analyze the data left on the various
digital systems allows, for example, to understand if a person has carried out
research on a possible pregnancy, if he has bought pregnancy tests, if he has
done research on abortion, if she went to a clinic that offers the IVG service,
if she contacted consultants run by pro-choic associations. Systems capable of
offering this type of analysis, even ignoring judicial mandates but using only
OSINT capabilities and data purchased from Data Brokers, exist and are now widely
used.

Also in the USA it is known that for years the ICE, i.e. the thugs who are
involved in kidnapping people without documents and deporting them, have been
using Palantir systems, which perform these tasks precisely.

It's not hard to imagine how similar tools could be used to track and monitor
pregnant people. It should be borne in mind that in certain states, such as
Alabama, it is possible to end up in prison for having "endangered a child" even
if this is a fetus. And you can go to jail while pregnant so that the state can
better protect the fetus.

The attack on reproductive freedoms is not a characteristic of the United States
alone: just think of European countries such as Poland or Italy itself. And all
of this depends on the ability of surveillance.

We can draw some conclusions:

Surveillance is by its nature everywhere and must therefore be fought everywhere
the ability to build a capacity for autonomous action, both individual and
collective, becomes of primary importance, aspects that are - indeed and contrary
to the vulgate - mutually linked
build defense capabilities of their own capabilities for autonomous action
learn to use secure means of communication and build secure networks
in the absence of this one will either be at the mercy of repression or of the
protection that can become repression

Article written by Anonymous for the Galatea-FAI Anarchist Group of Catania

https://gruppoanarchicogalatea.noblogs.org/post/2022/11/14/il-controllo-della-riproduzione-nel-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/
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