Giorgio Griziotti, Effimera, 16/11/2024
Translated by Fausto
Giudice, Tlaxcala
The other day, disembarking at Orly airport from Italy, I was heading with other passengers toward the exit when at one point a queue formed in front of a lighted tunnel with doors that let in one person at a time. Yet another automatic control and detection system, as if during air travel the passenger, already checked at boarding, could obtain weapons, drugs or other illicit products. This umpteenth anxiety-provoking airport novelty is one of many manifestations of the ubiquitous securitarian obsession in the real as well as the virtual accompanied by rhetoric that feeds the perception of continuous danger as promoting a culture of fear.
In fact, the danger often exists because proponents of the securitarian narrative and agents of cyberespionage are in the same camp and feed off each other.
Equalize, the now-investigated Italian corporate risk analysis company-read industrial espionage and not just industrial espionage since clients include the Mossad and the Vatican-is exemplary in this regard: its owner, in addition to being president of the Milano Fair Foundation, appointed in 2022 by the League member and Chamber of deputies chairman Lorenzo Fontana, and an advisor to Bocconi University, had close ties with senior government figures including none other than the president of the Senate and the much-investigated minister of tourism Daniela Santanchè.
Equalize is thus a contemporary illustration of the new power dynamics between controllers and controlled in the era of “Surveillance Capitalism”[1]. Zuboff, when she wrote the book a few years ago, hoped that capitalism was reformable; today a striking fact seems to disprove this assumption once and for all: the rise to power of Elon Musk.
As recounted by those who have been able to make forays into the future,[2] Musk's smashing arrival in the spheres of governance seals the entanglement between the state and techno-tycoons or techno-oligarchs, whatever you want to call them. Since the days of the industrial era, big business has been used to acquire and control the then mainstream media but now we are witnessing an unprecedented quantum leap. The seventeen billion impressions generated by Musk alone with his tweets during the election campaign exert a biopolitical influence incomparable even to that of the precursor Berlusconi with his electric media à la Mc Luhan. It is precisely the possession of enormous amounts of data that enables the platforms of neurocapitalism, largely autonomous in defining their own rules of operation, to exert relevant influence on narratives, perceptions, emotions and decisions. This power actively shapes elections, markets and even personal relationships, redefining their dynamics and directing their developments in profound and pervasive ways.
Now, returning to Equalize, it is not surprising that, in such a global context, intermediary actors are also emerging as new centers of private power. Through the use of artificial intelligence, data mining and hacking, they are managing to turn information into a tool of coercion and control.
In this particular case, Equalize's ambition was to become a kind of “Google of intelligence.” To this end, it had developed a platform called Beyond, which allowed for sophisticated reports simply by entering a query about a person or company. These reports offered detailed analysis and suggested further insights or investigation if needed.
Up to this point, Beyond might seem similar to other legal platforms. However, its deeply illicit nature, as discovered by investigators, lies in illegally obtaining information from protected and confidential databases through the use of RAT (Remote Access Trojan) malware, with which to gain full remote control of the target system.
Among the databases attacked are those, of the Internal Revenue Service [Serpico system, measuring the match between taxpayers' standard of living and their tax returns, Transl. note]), Istat (National institute of statistics), INPS (National Institute of Social Welfare), the National Registry Office (ANPR), the Currency Information System (Siva) of the Automobile club Italia (Aci), but above all the SDI, the Survey System of the Ministry of the Interior[3].
The relative ease, thanks in part to complicity and infiltration, with which Equalize/Beyond succeeds in downloading data directly from the Ministry of the Interior's servers highlights how even the most sensitive databases, managed by the central organs of the State, which should be hyper-protected, are now vulnerable and end up in the black market of stolen data. This is probably also the result of the increasing subcontracting of some of the most critical nodes of state functioning to the private sector. It is an erosion not only of the boundaries between public and private, but also of those between those who control and those who are controlled.
Users, often without being aware of it, voluntarily contribute to their own monitoring through the use of connected devices and digital platforms. This “participatory surveillance” generates a continuous feedback loop, in which the data produced is reprocessed to again influence the very individuals who generated it. An example of this mechanism can also be found in the case of Equalize, where, as one manager explained, detailed reports on site visits were collected daily, including information on who had logged in, from where, with what device and browser. This process allowed in-depth profiling of users, monitoring not only who accessed the platform, but also what they searched for.
Equalize is probably only the first major case to emerge, while others in Italy, Europe and elsewhere continue to operate in the shadows. They are the collateral and local symptoms of the wave of fascist techno-solutionism that gives the coup de grace to the now unreformable Western democracies as Emanuele Braga argues in a recent article in Effimera in which among other things he denounces the (stupid) bad faith of politicians and intellectuals of the late left. In this regard, to conclude, I was struck by the recent interview of David Colon, to the Manifesto with the significant title “The new frontier of the techno-oligarchs.” From the height of his chair at Science Po in Paris, Colon states that “tech billionaires intend to dethrone politics in favor of technology, artificial intelligence, in other words the tools that have made their fortunes.” Babbling, on the very day of Trump's election, about the “good” Western democracies to be saved because they are being seriously endangered by the “bad” autocracies of the rest of the world, the good “leftist” prof. does not even realize the nonsense of his claims. No technology has taken or will take the place of politics while Elon Musk & Co. are already the new political leaders of 21st century capitalism...
Post-scriptum
As we know, platform capitalism bases its profitability in the transformation of data from use value to exchange value (the so-called network value). The Equalize case is no exception. The democratic issue has relatively little to do with it. It is capitalism, my dear! The sale of data manipulated, managed, selected and profiled by the Beyond platform is in fact the main business of the operation. From what could be read from telephone intercepts published in some newspapers, a simple and single request for information (requiring no special ad hoc investigation) had an average cost of about 200 euros. The cost of retrieving such information was more or less 60 euros, with a certainly significant profit margin. The fact to remember is that this information is gathered from the profiling of the acts of daily life of each of us, bar none. In fact, recent algorithmic and cloud computing technologies make it possible to catalogue, select, manipulate, and classify the raw data that comes from the use of apps on cell phones, tablets, and computers into readable and saleable data, depending on the needs of the customer and the business. Not surprisingly, this is referred to as business intelligence. What is relatively new (at least for Italy) is the particularity of the data processed by the Equalize/Beyond platform: it is, in fact, extremely sensitive data that have to do with the issue of privacy and security, thus data with very high added value. We are no longer only faced with life being directly put to value and the becoming annuity of profit, but with the “political” becoming of profit, with all the implications that this entails (Andrea Fumagalli)
NOTES
[1] Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.
[2] Griziotti, Giorgio. Cronache del Boomernauta (Chronicles of the Boomernaut) Mimesis Editions, 2023 (to be published in English in 2025)
[3] The complex and extensive interagency information system, which is divided into 13 main application areas into which all kinds of information flows from complaints and investigations, from weapons management to foreigner control, from police intelligence to tender monitoring.
