Can Jews be Nazis?

BY STEPHEN F. EISENMAN

MAY 17, 2024
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Photographer unknown, Colonel Ernst Bloch, (German Mischling), c. 1944. 

For many people, the question is inflammatory. The crimes of the German Nazis were of such magnitude that comparison with any other historical violence is invidious. The genocide of the Jews was deliberate and methodical and intended to eliminate every last one. The goal was the same with the Romani and Sinti people. By comparison, the Israelis – currently accused of genocide — are rank amateurs. They have so far killed some 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza out of a population of 2.3 million.

But the question, “Can Jews be Nazis?” is nevertheless important for challenging claims of moral inoculation by virtue of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. If Israeli leaders are indeed committing a genocide in Gaza – as seems the case — they inhabit the same moral universe as the German Nazis, regardless of the suffering of past generations. In addition to the 35,000 killed, the war in Gaza has injured another 75,000 and displaced 2 million. Most of the victims are women and children – how can their deaths be justified? Israeli cabinet ministers, Knesset members, military personnel, and police have all freely spoken of their wish to force Palestinians into Egypt, establish Jewish-only settlements in Gaza, and even use an atomic bomb to kill everyone in the Gaza strip. (U.S. senator Lindsay Graham recently also suggested using a nuclear weapon against Gaza.)

Last week, the Israeli government suspended food and fuel deliveries to Gaza as collective punishment for a Hamas rocket attack that killed four soldiers. Such retribution is banned under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, by which Israel is bound. It also violates the teaching of the Hebrew prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel – “The person who sins; only he shall die.” One of the Hebrew sages, Hillel the Elder, reiterated the point in the Mishna, the “oral” Torah: “Each by his own sin will die’.

The 1948 U.N. Convention on the Crime of Genocide, describes it as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” By that definition, Israel has joined the club of violators and is subject to international sanction. When the International Criminal Court levels charges of genocide against Prime Minister Netanyahu, National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, Defense Minister Gallant, IDF Chief of Staff Halevi, and Finance Minister Smotrich – indictments could be announced any day — the men will be subject to arrest by all convention signatories, including the U.S. (Genocide is also prohibited under U.S. law, but to be prosecutable, the crime must be committed in the U.S. or by U.S. nationals.) The punishment for genocide is 30 years imprisonment, or in exceptional circumstances, life in prison. If Netanyahu manages to avoid trial for corruption in Israel, and if he lives long enough (he’s 74), he could be arrested and held in detention at an ICC facility outside the Hague in Scheveningen. His jailers there are unlikely to let him to indulge his taste for pink champagne and Cuban cigars.

Jewish Nazis in Nazi Germany

“Can jews be Nazis?” is also an historical question. To that, the answer is yes. Though membership in the German Nazi party was barred to Jews, thousands joined the Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht, and Kriegsmarine in the 1930s. They did so for the same reasons as other Germans: To serve the fatherland, forge a career, and continue a family tradition of military service. After passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Jews were barred from enlistment, but some managed to hide their ethnic origins (and lack of a foreskin), or else obtain papers from Nazi Party officials attesting to their deutschblütigkeit. One colonel in the Wehrmacht, Ernst Bloch, a Mischlinge (half-Jewish person) received the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross for bravery, the highest award given to military and paramilitary officers in Nazi Germany. His Judaism remained undetected until 1944, when he came to the attention of SS chief Henrich Himmler. A few weeks later, he received the following letter from his superior, major general Wilhelm Burgdorf, deputy chief of the Wehrmacht personnel office: “The Führer has decided as of 31 January 1945 to discharge you from active duty. It is an honor to thank you on behalf of the Führer for your service rendered during war and peace for our people and fatherland. I wish you all the best for the future. Heil Hitler.” The wonder is not that Bloch was detected after so long, but that he was apparently surprised at his dismissal. A few weeks later, he joined the Volkssturm (people’s militia) and was killed during the Soviet invasion of Berlin. There were thousand of other Jews, not all Mischlinge who attained high roles in the German military. Twenty of them were awarded the Iron Cross.

In all, thousands of Jews in Germany and occupied Europe – out of a population of about 9.5 million — assisted the Nazi regime in some way. Most did so under duress. Jewish ghetto councils, or Judenräte, established by Nazi officials in Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere, were tasked with distributing limited provisions of food and medicine, recruiting forced laborers, confiscating Jewish property, and supervising the Jewish ghetto police. By 1942 or ’43, some Judenräte and ghetto police were directly assisting local Nazis by identifying resistance leaders and organizing Jews for deportation to the death camps. The Jewish police could be cruel, especially the “13 Group,” established in Warsaw in 1940. They ran their own prison and reported directly to the Gestapo. Nevertheless, given the threats and ambient violence – refusal to comply with Gestapo orders usually meant death — it’s difficult to cast judgement on cooperating Jews. By the end of the war, the vast majority of them were dead.

Similar moral and legal complexity concerns Kapos and Sonderkommandos. The former were concentration or death-camp prisoners recruited to supervise and direct other prisoners. They were generally, but not always, selected from criminal-inmates to reduce the likelihood that they would feel solidarity with their charges. Kapos were accorded privileges in exchange for their services and their brutality: separate quarters, better food, and civilian clothes. If someone selected to be Kapo refused service, he would generally be returned to the ranks of regular prisoners, and somebody else appointed to take his place. Thus, it’s easy to see why so few resisted recruitment – if there was always someone available for the job, a prisoner would ask himself: “Why shouldn’t it be me, why shouldn’t I survive?”?

Sonderkommandos were death-camp workers, such as at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor, who cleared the gas chambers of bodies, put them in the crematoria, and disposed of the incinerated remains. The men who did this were generally recruited immediately upon arrival at the camps and would be shot or gassed at once if they refused. The work was of course unspeakable, and the Nazis made sure that it was unspoken; the Sonderkommandos were segregated from other prisoners to conceal the latter’s fate, and nearly all were themselves killed in an effort to hide the facts of the Holocaust from the world. A few survived however, and the tales they told exposed the harrowing of Hell. To call them collaborators would be to inflict posthumous punishment upon people whose souls were already shattered.

American Jewish Nazis

There is nothing funnier than a Jewish Nazi. That’s the unavoidable conclusion of any survey of post-War American comedy. In 1940, the popular Three Stooges (all Jewish), starred in the short film, You Nazty Spy in which Moe Howard plays a wallpaper hanger who somehow becomes Hailstone, the Hitler-mustachioed leader of the nation of Moronika. Two years later, the radio and TV comic Jack Benny (Jewish) starred with Carol Lombard in To Be or Not to Be (1942), directed by Ernst Lubitsch (Jewish). Benny plays Joseph Tura, a Polish stage actor who dresses up as a Gestapo officer to obtain a list of civilians targeted for Nazi reprisals. (It’s a very complicated plot.)

Immediately after the war, there were a spate of war movies with Jews playing Nazi roles, but few were comedies. Within about a decade, that began to change. On Your Show of Shows (1954) Sid Caesar (Jewish) and Howard Morris (Jewish) performed an eight-minute sketch called The German General in which Howard helps dress Caesar in his elaborate uniform – military tunic, medals, epaulets, sash, sword, and peaked hat — while both speak in pseudo-German (mixed with Yiddish) double-talk. I won’t give away punch line if you haven’t seen it. (Click on the link!) A decade later, Peter Sellers (Jewish) played a former Nazi, now an American nuclear weapons expert in the black comic Dr. Strangelove directed by Stanley Kubrick (Jewish). And in 1967, in what is perhaps the pinnacle of American, Jewish comedy, Mel Brooks (Jewish) wrote and directed The Producers, with a mainly Jewish cast either playing Nazis or abetting them. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (both Jewish) are the two producers who aim to mount a Broadway musical so tasteless that it closes in one night, allowing them to pocket all their investors’ money. Kenneth Mars (Jewish) plays Franz Liebkind, the Nazi-helmet wearing author of the play “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden,” and Dick Shawn (Jewish) is the hippy-dippy Fuhrer who steals the show and makes Springtime a success. During the Busby Berkeley-style production number before the play’s intermission, Brooks sings a single line, dubbing for one of the dancers in the chorus: “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty! Come and join the Nazi Party!”

The Producers, Mel Brooks, writer and director, Crossbow, Embassy and Columbia Pictures, 1967, screenshot.

At about the same time, there premiered a television comedy – I’m ashamed to admit it was one of my childhood favorites – called Hogan’s Heroes about a group of American GIs in a German POW camp, Stalag 13. The premise of the show is that the Nazis are comic buffoons, and the Americans are crafty and carefree, running an espionage and sabotage outfit from their barracks. The commandant of the camp, Colonel Klink was played by Werner Klemperer, the Jewish son of the great German conductor and composer, Otto Klemperer, and cousin of the literary scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer, whose three-volume journal of life under the Third Reich, I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil is one of the essential testaments of the period. The incompetent and good-natured character of Sergeant Schultz, whose oft-repeated catchphrase was “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing,” was played by the Ukraine-born John Banner (Jewish). He lost much of his family in the Holocaust, as did Robert Clary (Jewish), who played Corporal Louis LeBeau. Clary survived Buchenwald, while 12 other members of his immediate family were sent to Auschwitz, where they were all murdered. How he managed to keep his composure in that show – which ran for six seasons until 1971 – one can only guess.

The reason Jewish Nazis are funny is that with the few exceptions noted above, Jews could not be Nazis. So, a Jewish Nazi is both a contradiction in terms, and an affront to anti-Semites hell-bent on destroying them. In Freudian terms, the laughter arises from the short-circuiting or release of psychic energy (cathexis) that occurs when the logical chain – Nazi killer creates Jewish victim — is broken. The same violation of expectation and laughter follows from Woody Allen’s famous stand-up routine about the Klan, performed from 1962-64. One day, he tells his audience, he was in the Deep South, and some friends invited him to a costume party. He rarely goes to such things, he says, but decided to make an exception and go as a ghost, dressed in a white sheet. But on his way to the party, he is picked up by a car with three other men dressed in sheets and hoods. They are obviously Ku Klux Klansmen who mistake him for one of them. He tries to make small talk (about grits), but soon slips up and they discover Woody’s Jewish identity. Just on the point of being lynched, he makes such an eloquent plea for universal tolerance, that the Klansmen decide to let him go and contribute $2,000 for Israel bonds.

No joke

But the sell-by date for funny, Jewish Nazis is by now well past. What happens when Jews really do become Nazis – not party members, Klansmen or terrorists, but just Jews who, like some other Americans, embrace hatred, violence, racism and war? When Henry Kissinger was called a Nazi during the Nixon years and after, it was no joke. His indifference to mass murder was well-known. After his death, Ron Jacobs in Counterpunch offered the following summary:

“The list of murderous atrocities for which Henry Kissinger was in some part responsible is rivaled only by Adolf Hitler in 20th-century history. That list begins with the secret bombing of Cambodia, the genocide in Timor, the coup in Chile and the subsequent decades of fascist rule. It continues from there. If asked, I would argue that the primary difference between Hitler and Kissinger was the calculating and dispassionate manner in which Kissinger dispatched people to their deaths.  Indeed, when asked about whether or not the bombing of Cambodia was effective, Kissinger responded by saying, “Whether we got it right or not is really secondary.”  The deaths of more than a hundred thousand Cambodians in the bombing (and the subsequent coup and murderous campaign of the Khmer Rouge after the defeat of Saigon) were inconsequential in his mind.”

There have been many other, though perhaps lesser Jewish Nazis than Kissinger, that is, men and women indifferent to human suffering, and complicit in murder, genocide, and ecocide. They include Elliot Abrams, Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. He helped cover up or even facilitated genocidal attacks upon campesinos in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. He was also a key planner for the Iran-Contra affair, which illegally shipped arms and money to the terrorist contras in Nicaragua.

Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State under President Clinton, was architect of the Iraq sanctions that killed millions. In 1995 alone, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, more than half a million Iraqi children died from illness and starvation due to the sanctions. When asked by Leslie Stahl if the price was worth it, she replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price? We think the price is worth it.”

Stephen Miller, former special advisor to Trump, was champion of the Muslim travel ban and architect of the policy that separated children from their migrant parents. Lately he has been plotting a new anti-immigrant “blitz” if Trump is elected again. “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest,” Miller said, “are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.” Miller has been busy lately, accusing of anti-Semitism anyone sympathetic to the plight of Gazans.

And on it goes. Jewish university chancellor Gene Block at UCLA allowed a gang of non-student thugs, a veritable Freikorps, to riot and attack peaceful anti-war student protestors. The violent mob was partly funded and abetted by Jessica Seinfeld, wife of the famous comedian. Another Jewish billionaire, Bill Ackman, also offered support for the UCLA counter-protesters, before withdrawing it when press and public responses to it turned soured. (He also funded raucous, pro-Israeli rallies at George Washington University and elsewhere.)

The point of this is not is not to say that wealthy and powerful Jews are uniquely abetting a genocide in Gaza or are masterminds behind global criminality. Those are versions of the anti-Semitic canards that enabled the rise of fascism and Nazism and that still animate the far-right in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. Jews comprise just 2.4 per cent of the U.S. population and 0.2% of the global population and have little sway over anything, anywhere, except in Israel and Palestine. There, a faction of far-right leaders has gained political and ideological sway over a small, but militarily powerful nation now hell-bent on genocide. They are proud decedents of the terrorist Irgun and Herut parties (which evolved into Likud), denounced by Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein and others at the time as “closely akin in [their] organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” No more and apparently no less than any other community, Jews today are prey to fascist and Nazi ideation, despite their own catastrophic experience with it. That makes the heroism of Jewish protestors – students and faculty alike – at UCLA, USC, Columbia and dozens of other colleges and universities across the country all the more noteworthy and necessary. It’s also why journalists, politicians, business leaders and the rest of us have the obligation to speak up loudly against fascism, genocide, and war in Gaza and wherever else it occurs.

Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Guide to American Fascism,” and is forthcoming from OR Books. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu  

Defending Privacy in the Surveillance State and Fragmenting Internet

BY JOHN P. RUEHL

 MAY 17, 2024
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Photo by Etienne Girardet

Following the reapproval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on April 20, 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer proudly declared that “bipartisanship has prevailed here in the Senate.” Despite the increasing rarity of bipartisanship in recent years, support for government surveillance continues to unite large majorities across party lines. Established in 1978, FISA allows government surveillance and data collection of individuals suspected of espionage or terrorism within the U.S., marking one of the many mechanisms aiming to ensure total federal oversight of communications.

Governments ranging from democracies to dictatorships, socialist to capitalist have all developed policies and bureaucracies for maximum data collection and mass surveillance as their populations become digitized. The centralized nature of modern communications grids facilitates many forms of surveillance. As internet services centralize domestically and the internet fragments internationally, countering government and private sector abuse of surveillance or developing alternative systems will require steady public pressure and some ingenuity to attain real enforcement.

One of the takeaways that a review of the history of modern surveillance, from the early days of the telephone to so-called privacy apps like Signal, tells us is that efforts to escape, undermine, and subvert the surveillance efforts of governments tend to be counterproductive. They are often originated by states themselves as part of a dialectic process that enables more comprehensive surveillance in a series of stages or just produces greater surveillance infrastructure in response to the attempt to develop alternative communications systems.

In the pre-internet era, authorities would tap into telegraph and later telephone lines to intercept communications, often requiring access to the physical infrastructure of the networks. Mail sent by post could meanwhile be intercepted and opened. As communication systems evolved, so too did government techniques to surveil them. The switch from copper wire phone systems to fiber optic cables and the spread of the internet initially threatened the NSA’s ability to monitor communications, for example, until the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994. Communications companies were required to build back doors for the NSA to monitor remotely, while the NSA also clandestinely worked on developing technologies to monitor communications.

U.S. domestic surveillance powers have been routinely updated during the 21st Century, including the enactment of the 2001 PATRIOT Act, the 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), and the 2018 FISA reauthorization. The 2013 Snowden Leaks revealed the NSA asked for funding to “insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems”, and it is constantly pushing for backdoors into encryption software to access communications and devices. Major mobile carriers acknowledge the inclusion of preinstalled surveillance and data mining technology in devices supported by Google, Apple, and Microsoft, while the NSA’s PRISM programextracts data from all major technology companies with or without their consent.

U.S. companies primarily cooperate with the U.S. government under the banner of “surveillance capitalism,” allowing them to capitalize on their data and surveillance capabilities both for government and private endeavors. Similar to other countries, most of the U.S. internet traffic now flows through a handful of large entities rather than numerous smaller ones. Furthermore, U.S. user data is also more available to the private sector compared to that of EU citizens, with companies like Facebook and Google even compiling dossiers on non-users to enhance targeted advertising.

In addition to ad monetization, lax privacy laws also play a role in security. Established in 1976, the third-party doctrine allows U.S. law enforcement to access user data without a warrant. The Ring video system, acquired by Amazon in 2018, created hundreds of partnerships with U.S. police departments to help them gain access to user recordings, while numerous other companies actively provide law enforcement agencies with access to user data.

The issue extends beyond monetization and law enforcement. Political actors have recognized the potential of data to shape politics. In 2018, Facebook faced scrutiny when it was revealed that private company Cambridge Analytica was permitted to access user data and target them with political ads to influence their voting behavior. Moreover, anti-abortion groups have caused controversy by using location data to send ads to those who visited Planned Parenthood centers.

Of similar concern is the abuse of data by employees. In 2017, reports surfaced of employees of Ring doorbell company spying on female users, while Amazon’s Alexa retained recordings of children long after parents requested their deletion. Hackers have also accessed user data and feeds of Ring customer cameras across the U.S.

Alongside extensive domestic surveillance and data collection methods, the expansion of the internet in the 1990s led to a surge in global U.S. surveillance and data collection capabilities. Despite the promotion of a “global multi-stakeholder model of internet governance”, U.S.-based Organizations like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), allowed Washington considerable control over the governance, standards-setting, and the activities of major internet actors. While these advantages for Washington may have declined since the 1990s, the rise of Big Tech and other factors guarantee the U.S. ongoing influence over much of the internet.

The disclosure of ECHELON in the 1990s exposed a global signals intelligence (SIGINT) network operated by the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Five Eyes), while the Snowden leaks in 2013 uncovered further aspects of the surveillance alliance. Significant data sharing also occurs between the U.S. and European countries, often facilitated through organizations like NATO.

The 2022 interception of a British citizen’s Snapchat message about a potential plane bombing, leading to the escorting of the plane by the Spanish air force, demonstrates strong Western data and surveillance collaboration. Multilateral efforts are supplemented by national measures like France’s Intelligence Act and the UK’s “Snooper’s Charter.”

Nonetheless, the U.S.-led internet faces mounting challenges as various blocs and countries impose restrictions and tighten control over their networks. The Snowden leaks exposed the ability of the Five Eyes to circumvent their domestic spy laws and even target high-profile officials like the German chancellor. Partly in response to the leaks, the EU introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 to limit data intrusion by foreign states and corporations and improve regulations on data collection.

Countries more hostile to Washington are also asserting greater autonomy over their data and communications networks, leading to more apparent cracks in the global internet. The Russian government’s takeover of Russian social media site VKontakte in 2014 and increasing pressure on Telegram and Yandex in recent years have helped reinforce the Kremlin’s concept of a “sovereign internet.” The Russian government has conducted several trial runs of disconnecting the country from the global internet, while its efforts to centralize control and quell dissident opinion have intensified since the launch of the war in Ukraine, including blocking access to Western sites.

Moscow has also been re-establishing surveillance and data-sharing agreements with Central Asian states since the Soviet collapse, using these arrangements to target Russians who fled abroad after the invasion of Ukraine. China’s autonomy from the U.S.-dominated internet infrastructure ismore advanced, and in Central Asia and other regions, Chinese companiesvie with Russian counterparts for the export of surveillance and data collection technologies.

Notably, Western companies have played an influential role in assisting authoritarian governments to enhance their communications control and reduce dependence on U.S.-led internet infrastructure. U.S. corporations like Cisco helped build the “Great Firewall of China” and domestic surveillance capabilities, while Palantir assisted the United Arab Emirates. Nokia meanwhile contributed to Russia’s development of its System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM), which has also been replicated across Central Asia.

In response to concerns over decreasing privacy from government surveillance and private sector data collection, various initiatives have emerged in the decades since the internet appeared. These range from underground forums to marketplaces for illicit goods and servers, as well as blockchain technology, a decentralized method of storing and sharing data through computers. Search engines like DuckDuckGo position themselves as untraceable, while virtual private networks (VPNs) encrypt internet traffic to provide users with anonymity and data security. Tor, a software that reroutes and encrypts internet traffic through several to protect user identities, went public in 2002. A follow-up app, Signal is internationally believed to be a viable encrypted and private messaging platform.

Together, these components constitute what users are told is the Dark Webor darknet, an obscured part of the internet that is perceived as a means to evade government surveillance and control. But many of them have their roots in the same surveillance world that their marketers claim to be opposed to. Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo’s privacy has been questioned, VPNs can be compromised, and flaws in Tor’s code are found regularly. Early U.S. government involvement and funding in both Tor and Signal suggest they are less secure than promoted. Tor was originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the mid-1990s before it went public, while Signal was partly funded by the government-sponsored Open Technology Fund (OTF), which has ties to the U.S. intelligence community.

The appointment of Katherine Maher to the chairman of Signal’s board in 2023, who previously worked for the National Democratic Institute and Foreign Affairs Policy Board, has also raised questions about the app’s security. Other anti-surveillance projects developed partly by the OTF, including Open Whisper Systems, CryptoCat, LEAP, and GlobaLeaks, have also had their authenticity questioned.

Dark Web-affiliated systems are also used by states. Russian authorities began cracking down on VPN services, Tor, and other services just before the war in Ukraine, but a year later, they cautiously permitted the expansion of these closely monitored channels to circumvent sanctions. The Iranian government also has a long history of using the dark web to more effectively evade U.S. oversight, while also striving to prevent its citizens from using it to undermine state authority. Even the CIA has developed its own Tor website for communication.

To avoid the dilemma of choosing between a government-monitored internet in collaboration with Big Tech and a lawless Dark Web of dubious anonymity, a middle ground termed Web 3.0 has emerged. Characterized by buzzwords like decentralization and blockchain technology, its proponents seek a more community-driven and peer-to-peer internet landscape with less surveillance and control by the current arbiters of the internet.

However, without true anonymity, these transparency efforts will make surveillance easier. Governments not only develop national and international communication systems but also support private initiatives and those developed by Academia to maintain control over all potential communications systems, including Web 3.0. If certain systems emerge that threaten government surveillance measures, they are either shut down, like the Silk Road, or compromised by various methods including operatives in both U.S.and foreign companies. Instead, Web 3.0 may be more useful in preserving the more open and connected aspect of the internet, though it will still be widely monitored.

Computer hardware and operating systems enable these apps to function inside devices that permit an overlay of surveillance on user activity, no matter the alleged privacy capabilities promised to users. The U.S., Australia, and other countries’ efforts to ban Chinese-made Huawei devices highlight the ease of data collection and surveillance through such technologies, revealing similar capabilities in U.S.-made devices, despite the alleged security provided by privacy apps and other measures. The escalating rivalrybetween the U.S. and China in developing massive new undersea internet cables shows the intensifying efforts of rival blocs to secure their own communications and surveil others.

Without the ability to create an alternative system not dominated by governments and Big Tech, stronger public oversight over their surveillance and data collection methods is essential for personal privacy. The 34 Senators who voted against FISA’s reauthorization in April demonstrated bipartisan support exists for reducing the government’s surveillance and data collection powers, while 15 U.S. states have so far adopted stronger data privacy laws for consumers in recent years.

Creating a clear and enforceable punishment system for both government agencies and private companies for data and surveillance abuse will be essential for any attempt to establish greater privacy safeguards. Increasing public awareness of the overt surveillance capabilities of devices and apps, even amidst the massive growth of the privacy protection industry, is a quick way to advance this cause.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. He is currently finishing a book on Russia to be published in 2022.