In military planning, understanding the human terrain used to mean studying tribes, loyalties, customs, and fault lines. Now, it means studying your digital footprint—where you eat, how fast you drive, what time you wake up, who you text, and what you binge-watch after a long day at the SCIF. And the twist? You volunteered all of it.
Welcome to surveillance capitalism—the only intelligence collection program you willingly subscribe to, pay for, and carry in your pocket.
What used to require a hostile intelligence officer, a compromising agent, and a brush pass in Vienna can now be done by buying data from an ad exchange. Want to track a battalion’s movements? Pull location pings from delivery apps. Want to identify cleared personnel by face? Scrape public-facing photos, run them through facial recognition, and cross-reference with breach data. This isn’t a theoretical threat. It’s a thriving industry.
The adversary didn’t need to build it. We did. They’re just cashing in.
Surveillance Capitalism: A Commercial SIGINT Platform
At its core, surveillance capitalism is the economic system built on extracting, analyzing, and monetizing behavioral data. Your clicks, swipes, routes, and rhythms are turned into predictions—and those predictions are sold. Mostly to marketers. Sometimes to anyone with a credit card and fewer scruples.
You are not the customer. You are the product.
And if you’re in the national security space, you’re a high-value product.
The problem is that while we’ve trained people to protect classified data, we haven’t trained them to protect behavioral data. But guess what? The adversary doesn’t need a copy of your brief—they need to know how you behave, what influences you, and where your vulnerabilities lie. They want your rhythms, not your reports.
In CI terms, this is a targeting dossier at scale, with no need to task a case officer. The metadata is the message.
The New MICE: Monetization, Influence, Correlation, Exploitation
The old MICE acronym—Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego—still applies. But in a surveillance capitalist landscape, it’s time to modernize:
- Monetization: Your data is for sale—and adversaries can buy it wholesale.
- Influence: Targeted messaging based on personality profiles isn’t just persuasion—it’s manipulation at machine speed.
- Correlation: You may keep work and home separate. Your apps don’t. Triangulation of behavior makes compartmentation obsolete.
- Exploitation: Location data, keystrokes, purchase history—all mined to identify weaknesses and habits. Blackmail doesn’t start with a secret affair anymore. It starts with a fitness tracker.
Counterintelligence in the Age of Consumer Surveillance
Counterintelligence must evolve. We can’t just guard secure facilities and monitor foreign nationals. We must treat surveillance capitalism as a hostile collection platform and adapt accordingly:
- CI Training for the Digital Terrain: Most national security professionals don’t need to be hackers—but they do need to understand how they’re exposed. Training must shift from “don’t talk on social media” to “understand how your car shares your location while it’s parked.”
- Red Teaming with Commercial Data: We conduct insider threat audits and penetration tests—but do we ever simulate adversarial targeting using commercially available data? We should.
- Behavioral Signature Management: Just as we train physical signature reduction in deployed environments, we need behavioral signature reduction online. Spoofed accounts, randomized behavior, and metadata obfuscation should be standard kit.
- Partnerships with Industry: Adtech built the problem, but that doesn’t mean it can’t help solve it. Intelligence and defense sectors should be demanding privacy-preserving infrastructure in everything from fitness trackers to procurement platforms.
Surveillance Capitalism Is a CI Blind Spot
We’ve built a digital ecosystem that assumes the user is benign and the adversary is foreign. That assumption is outdated. In truth, the adversary now operates within the system—using the commercial layer as a collection platform.
And if that sounds familiar, it should. Because this is what CI is designed to detect, deny, and disrupt.
Only now, the battlefield is everywhere. Your phone. Your home. Your kid’s school. The mall near your base.
The enemy isn’t at the gates. The enemy is buying your data from a pop-up ad.
