Phone microphone ad targeting
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Discussing surveillance in 2021, John Kiriakou said that the technology companies go further than they admit to, even when they admit things in front of a congressional panel, and offered an example from his own life. 

The concealed carry ads

He had gone through periods of getting a lot of threats, he explains: if he goes on television, on Fox News or MSNBC or wherever, threats follow, because there are a lot of crazy people out there. So he was talking on the telephone to a friend of his who happens to be a firearms instructor, and the friend asked whether he had ever had a concealed carry permit. Kiriakou said he had one until 2012, but that he now has a felony conviction and cannot own a gun any more, which, he noted in passing, is one of the reasons he needs a pardon. 

The friend said it was too bad he could not carry a gun, and they ended the conversation. Five minutes later Kiriakou went onto Facebook, and every single advertisement in his feed was for a concealed carry class. Every single ad. His conclusion: they're even listening on the phone. They're listening when your phone is turned off.  

The corroborating account

His interviewer immediately matched it with his own case: a band practice on a Saturday night at which the group discussed a 1980 cream-coloured Fender Jazz Bass with a tortoiseshell pickguard that he used to own, with his phone in sleep mode. The next day he had five different advertisements for people playing that bass, in that specific colour scheme, including one woman offering lessons on it, eight or nine in a row. Kiriakou confirmed the detail that mattered to him, that the phone had been in sleep mode. 

The framework he places it in

Kiriakou's general position is that the surveillance is not principally imposed but volunteered. We put all the information out there on ourselves, he says, so there is no need to pay sources, and Facebook does not give us the platform out of the goodness of its heart; it monetises our personal data.  He also cites facial recognition as the reason so many people were arrested so quickly after the January 6 Capitol riot: the authorities had only to take stills from broadcast video and feed them into a database already stocked with driver's licence photographs and images from Facebook, Google, YouTube and TikTok.  

See also

- Alexa
- CIA Smart TV Surveillance
- Government Purchase of Social Media Metadata
- NSA Surveillance
- Flock cameras
- NSA Surveillance
- Consulting Job Entrapment Offers
