Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Propaganda and advertising have always been designed to appeal to unacknowledged fears and yearnings. This is not the first time that the unconscious mind has been targeted as an instrument of others’ aims. (Public Opinion Series) These have relied more on art than science, using gross data or professional intuition for the purpose of mass communication. Those operations cannot be compared to the scientific application of today’s historic computational power to the micro-measured, continuous rendition of your more-or-less actual feelings.

Surveillance capitalists declare their right to modify others’ behavior for profit according to methods that bypass human awareness, individual decision rights, and the entire complex of self-regulatory processes that we summarize with terms such as autonomy and self-determination. The new toolmakers do not intend to rob you of your inner life, only to surveil and exploit it. All they ask is to know more about you than you know about yourself.

At no other time in history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy.

Under surveillance capitalism, the means of production serves the means of behavioral modification. Machine processes replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust.

Social Media

Behavioral Modification Theorists

Herding Societal Distrust

Big Other

Facebook Likes

Facial Action Coding System (FACS)

Computerized Emotion Detection

Affectiva Emotion AI

Realeyes

Stealth Wear

Public Opinion Series

New York tenants fight as landlords embrace facial recognition cameras

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/29/new-york-facial-recognition-cameras-apartment-complex

30 May 2019

More than 130 residents at a Brooklyn apartment complex oppose plan to use the cameras, whose use is quietly expanding in cities. At Atlantic Plaza Towers in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the landlord, Nelson Management Group, is moving to install a new system to control entry into the buildings. It would use facial recognition to open the front door for recognized tenants rather than traditional keys or electronic key fobs. “We do not want to be tagged like animals,” said Icemae Downes, who has lived at Atlantic Plaza Towers since it opened 51 years ago. “We are not animals. We should be able to freely come in and out of our development without you tracking every movement.”

The row, which the tenants believe could become an important test case, comes as concern about the spread of facial recognition systems has grown across the US and globally, with law enforcement agencies increasingly relying on the tool. San Francisco this month became the first US city to ban city police and government agencies from using it. Private firms are also increasingly keen on the technology.

Residents fear the move reflects the spreading pressures of gentrification further into the east of Brooklyn, and a desire to attract white, higher-income residents in the buildings, whose tenants are mostly black. They say there is already a culture of surveillance and that if they are suspected of breaking one of the building’s rules, they might find an image of themselves pushed under their doors. Facial recognition algorithms are less accurate when used on black people and women, as compared with white people and men.

San Francisco is first US city to ban police use of facial recognition tech

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/14/san-francisco-facial-recognition-police-ban

14 May 2019

San Francisco supervisors have voted to make the city the first in the United States to ban police and other government agencies from using facial recognition technology. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who championed the legislation, said: ‘We can have security without being a security state. We can have good policing without being a police state.’ And part of that is building trust with the community based on good community information, not on Big Brother technology.” Critics argued that police need all the help they can get, especially in a city with high rates of property crime. .

China's Xinjiang citizens monitored with police app, says rights group

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48130048

02 May 2019

Chinese police are using a mobile app to keep data on millions of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang province. The app is used to closely monitor behaviors, including lack of socializing, using too much electricity or having acquaintances abroad. In particular, it targets "36 person types" that authorities should pay attention to. These include people who seldom use their front door, use an abnormal amount of electricity and those that have gone on Hajj - an Islamic pilgrimage - without state authorization. China has 170 million CCTV cameras in place across the country and by the end of 2020, an estimated 400 million new ones will be installed. All this is part of China's aim to build what it calls "the world's biggest camera surveillance network". China's also setting up a "social credit" system that is meant to keep score of the conduct and public interactions of all its citizens. The aim is that by 2020, everyone in China will be enrolled in a vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information, including minor traffic violations, and distils it into a single number - ranking each citizen.

Stealth Wear

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Berlin-based artist Adam Harvey, whose work is aimed at the problem of surveillance and foiling the power of those who surveil. Harvey’s art begins with reverse engineering computer vision algorithms in order to detect and exploit their vulnerabilities through camouflage and other forms of hiding. He is perhaps best known for his “Stealth Wear,” a series of wearable fashion pieces intended to overwhelm, confuse, and evade drone surveillance and, more broadly, facial-recognition software. Silver-plated fabrics reflect thermal radiation, “enabling the wearer to avert overhead thermal surveillance.” Harvey’s fashions are inspired by traditional Islamic dress, which expresses the idea that “garments can provide a separation between man and God.” Now he redirects that meaning to create garments that separate human experience from the powers that surveil.

Adam Harvey Projects

https://ahprojects.com/projects/

Social Media

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the “others,” especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging, and inclusion. Young people crave the hive, and Facebook gives it to them, but this time it’s owned and operated by surveillance capital and scientifically engineered.

It boasts detailed information on mood shifts among young people based on internal Facebook data, and it claims that Facebook’s prediction products can not only detect sentiment but also predict how emotions are communicated at different points during the week, matching each emotional phase with appropriate ad messaging for the maximum probability of guaranteed outcomes.

Today’s means of behavioral modification are aimed unabashedly at “us.” Everyone is swept up in this new market dragnet, including the psychodramas of ordinary, unsuspecting fourteen-year-olds approaching the weekend with anxiety. By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions, and Internet activity, Facebook can work out when young people feel stressed, defeated, overwhelmed, anxious, nervous, stupid, silly, useless, and a failure.

Big Other

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Power was once identified with the ownership of the means of production, but it is now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification that is Big Other. Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience.

Big Other does not care what we think, feel, or do as long as its millions, billions, and trillions of sensate, actuating, computational eyes and ears can observe, render, datafy, and instrumentalize the vast reservoirs of behavioral surplus that are generated in the galactic uproar of connection and communication.

Google tripled its number of machine intelligence scientists in just the last few years and has become the top contributor to the most prestigious scientific journals—four to five times the world average in 2016. Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, their genius is meant to storm the gates of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behavior.

Herding Societal Distrust

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Societies that display low levels of interpersonal trust also tend to display low levels of trust toward legitimate authority; indeed, levels of trust toward the government have declined substantially in the US. The declaration of a “war on terror” legitimated every inclination to enshrine machine-produced certainty as the ultimate solution to societal uncertainty.

The state’s continuous demands for the intensification of surveillance capitalism’s production of instrumentarian power—expressed in the growth and elaboration of Big Other—is the preferred solution to social breakdown, mistrust, and uncertainty. The aim is the automation of society through tuning, herding, and conditioning people to produce preselected behaviors judged as desirable by the state and thus able to “preempt instability.”

Chinese users are rendered, classified, and queued up for prediction with every digital touch, and so are we. We are ranked on Uber, on eBay, on Facebook, and on many other web businesses, and those are only the rankings that we see. Chinese users are assigned a “character” score, whereas the US government urges the tech companies to train their algorithms for a “radicalism” score.

Totalistic rendering and control of all human behavior will serve civilization in a hyperconnected future, and there is no sign of hesitation to assert computational governance over the whole domain of human endeavor for the sake of a collective destiny.

The Bewildered Herd

Chatty Kathy

I was talking to a younger co-worker and mentioned that a friend of mine who when had a couple beers became a Chatty Kathy. Though he laughed, in retrospect, I wondered if he actually knew what I meant by ‘Chatty Kathy’ considering that it’s a dated phrase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatty_Cathy

Chatty Cathy was a pull string "talking" doll manufactured by the Mattel toy company from 1959 to 1965. Chatty Cathy was on the market for six years and was the second most popular doll of the 1960s after Barbie. The doll had eleven phrases when it came on the market in 1960 such as "I love you", "I hurt myself!" or "Please take me with you." Seven more phrases such as, "Let's play school" or "May I have a cookie?" were added to the doll's repertoire in 1963 for a total of 18 phrases. The term "Chatty Cathy" can be used to refer to a particularly talkative person.

I had two older sisters while growing up in the sixties, and our household had a Chatty Kathy doll. A child will share their most intimate thoughts and emotions with a doll. A doll that could say phrases appealing to a child became immortalized in the culture as a saying ‘Chatty Kathy’.

Which made me wonder, what are today’s techno dolls like where a child shares their most intimate thoughts and emotions? I suspect they would be interactive dolls where every interaction is uploaded into big data, processed, evaluated, compared, trended, and forecasted to the point where AI could know the sexual orientation of the child before the child or parents knew, building a complete psychological profile of the child to be sold and capitalized upon.

Is there such a doll? If not, there will be.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Propaganda and advertising have always been designed to appeal to unacknowledged fears and yearnings. This is not the first time that the unconscious mind has been targeted as an instrument of others’ aims. These have relied more on art than science, using gross data or professional intuition for the purpose of mass communication. Those operations cannot be compared to the scientific application of today’s historic computational power to the micro-measured, continuous rendition of your more-or-less actual feelings.

Surveillance capitalists declare their right to modify others’ behavior for profit according to methods that bypass human awareness, individual decision rights, and the entire complex of self-regulatory processes that we summarize with terms such as autonomy and self-determination. The new toolmakers do not intend to rob you of your inner life, only to surveil and exploit it. All they ask is to know more about you than you know about yourself.

At no other time in history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy.

Under surveillance capitalism, the means of production serves the means of behavioral modification. Machine processes replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust.

Realeyes

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Realeyes says that its data sets contain over 5.5 million individually annotated frames of more than 7,000 subjects from all over the world: “We are continuously working to build the world’s largest expression and behavior datasets by increasing the quality and volume of our already-existing categories, and by creating new sets—for other expressions, emotions, different behavioral clues or different intensities. Having automated this process, it can then be scaled up to simultaneously track the emotions of entire audiences.”

A Realeyes white paper explains that its webcams record people watching videos in their homes “so we can capture genuine reactions.” Algorithms process facial expressions, and “emotions are detected, aggregated, and reported online in real time, second by second enabling our clients to make better business decisions.” Realeyes emphasizes its own “proprietary metrics” to help marketers “target audiences” and “predict performance”.

Realeyes: https://www.realeyesit.com/

Behavioral Modification Theorists

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

A storm of controversy made Skinner’s science of human behavior Beyond Freedom & Dignity an international best seller. The public rejected Skinner’s argument that there were cultural matters more important than preserving and extending individual freedom.

Pentland’s book, Social Physics, summons Skinner’s social vision into the twenty-first century. Both Skinner and Pentland believe in the authority of the utopianists to impose their plan. In Pentland’s view, Facebook already exemplifies these dynamics. Its contagion experiments reveal active mastery of the ability to manipulate human empathy and attachment with tuning techniques such as priming and suggestion.

In an article titled “The Death of Individuality,” Pentland insists that “instead of individual rationality, our society appears to be governed by a collective intelligence that comes from the surrounding flow of ideas and examples. It is time that we dropped the fiction of individuals as the unit of rationality and recognized that our rationality is largely determined by the surrounding social fabric.”

The Group Mind

Facial Action Coding System (FACS)

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

The conception of emotions as observable behavioral data first took root in the mid-1960s with the work of Paul Ekman, then a young professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Ekman argued that “actions speak louder than words.” Even when a person is determined to censor or control his or her emotional communications, Ekman postulated that some types of nonverbal behaviors “escape control and provide leakage.” He recognized the potential utility of a “categorical scheme” that reliably traced the effects of expression back to their causes in emotion, and in 1978 Ekman published the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).

FACS distinguishes the elemental movements of facial muscles, breaking them down into twenty-seven facial “action units,” along with more for the head, eyes, tongue, and so on. Later, Ekman concluded that six “basic emotions” (anger, fear, sadness, enjoyment, disgust, and surprise) anchored the wider array of human emotional expression.

Affectiva Emotion AI

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Rosalind Picard eventually became part of this new emotion detection industry with a company called Affectiva. By 2016, Rana El-Kaliouby was Affectiva’s CEO, redefining its business as “Emotion AI” and calling it the next frontier of artificial intelligence. The company had raised $34 million in venture capital, included 32 Fortune 100 companies and 1,400 brands from all over the world among its clients, and claimed to have the largest repository of emotion data in the world, with 4.8 million face videos from 75 countries, continuing to expand its supply routes with data sourced from online viewing, video game participation, driving, and conversation.

This is the commercial context in which Kaliouby came to feel that it is perfectly reasonable to assert that an “emotion chip” will become the base operational unit of a new “emotion economy.” She speaks to her audiences of a chip embedded in all things everywhere, running constantly in the background, producing an emotion pulse.

Affectiva: https://www.affectiva.com/

Facebook Likes

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

In 2013 a provocative study by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Microsoft’s Thore Graepel revealed that Facebook “likes” could automatically and accurately estimate a wide range of personal attributes that people would typically assume to be private, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.

The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behavior. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site. The “personal relevancy” score scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked.

Experiments are run on every user at some point in their tenure on the site. Whether that is seeing different size ad copy, or different marketing messages, or different call-to-action buttons, or having their feeds generated by different ranking algorithms.

Facebook is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later. Facebook owns an unprecedented means of behavior modification that operates covertly and in the absence of social or legal mechanisms of agreement, contest, and control.

Computerized Emotion Detection

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

The program of emotional rendition began with MIT Media Lab professor Rosalind Picard and the new field of computer science that she called “affective computing.” She was among the first to recognize the opportunity for a computational system to automate the analysis of Ekman’s facial configurations and correlate micro-expressions with their emotional causality. The idea was creating software modules capable of detecting emotions, expressions or other characteristics of a user from image information.

She also noted the possibility of intrusive workplace monitoring, and she voiced reservations about the possibility of a dystopian future in which “malevolent” governmental forces use affective computing to manipulate and control the emotions of populations. By early 2014, Facebook had already applied for an “emotion detection” patent designed to implement each of Picard’s fears.

Governor Winship Strike Breaker - January 1934

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

On January 12, 1934, President Roosevelt appointed General Blanton Winship, a retired army general, as governor of Puerto Rico. General Winship was not sent to Puerto Rico to negotiate. He was sent to crush labor strikes, subdue Nationalists, and kill them if necessary. It didn’t take long before he did just that.

From the moment he arrived, General Winship proceeded to militarize the entire island. He urged the building of a naval air base and created new, vigorous police-training camps. He added hundreds of men to the insular police force, equipping every unit with machine guns, tear gas, and riot gear, and painted their cars a suggestive new color: blood red. The new police uniforms resembled those of WWII military officers. The FBI initiated round-the-clock surveillance of the Nationalist leadership. An additional 115 Insular Police were armed with carbines, submachine guns, and grenades. Nationalists were imprisoned for “incitement to riot” against the United States.

 

War Transforms

Lucifer Effect Series

On Killing Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

War provides the institutionally approved permission to kill or wound one’s adversaries. Most wars are about old men persuading young men to harm and kill other young men like themselves. A key ingredient in transforming ordinarily non-aggressive young men into warriors who can kill on command if first to change their external appearance, altering their usual external facade by putting on military uniforms or masks or painting their faces. With the anonymity thus provided in place, out go their usual internal compassion and concern for others

In all wars, at all times, in every country, wars transform ordinary, even good men into killers. That is what soldiers are trained to do, to kill their designated enemies. However, under the extreme stresses of combat conditions, with fatigue, fear, anger, hatred, and revenge at full throttle, men can lose their moral compass and go beyond killing enemy combatants. Unless military discipline is strictly maintained and every soldier knows he bears personal responsibility for his actions, which are under surveillance by senior officers, then the furies are released in unimaginable orgies of rape and murder of civilians as well by enemy soldiers. We know such loss was true at My Lai and in other less well-known military massacres, such as those of the “Tiger Force” in Vietnam. This elite fighting unit left a seven-month-long trail of executions of unarmed civilians. Sadly, the brutality of war that spills over from the battlefield to the hometown has become true again in Iraq.

Wartime atrocities occur in all wars and are committed by most occupying forces, even high tech ones. Combat is about stress, and criminal behavior toward civilians in a classic combat stress symptom. If you get enough soldiers into enough combat, some of them are going to murder civilians.

We must acknowledge that soldiers are well-trained killers who have successfully completed an intense learning experience in boot camp, with the battlefield as their testing ground. They must learn to suppress their prior moral training guided by the commandment “thou shalt not kill.” New military training is known as the science of “killology.” This term was coined by LtCol Dave Grossman, now a West Point professor of military science, is elaborated in his book On Killing.

 Photo Credit: Francoise Demulder 1976 Palestine

George Orwell's 1984

Public Opinion Series

1984 by George Orwell, 1949, Excerpt

War is Peace.

Freedom is Slavery.

Ignorance is Strength.

A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

George Orwell's 1984 heading for Broadway

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38854721

03 Feb 2017

Dystopian novel 1984 has been topping US bestseller lists in recent weeks - and now a stage version previously seen in the West End is heading to Broadway. Its talk of "newspeak" and surveillance seem to have struck a nerve recently. Sales of the George Orwell book rose after US president Donald Trump's adviser said the White House was issuing "alternative facts" over the size of the crowds at his inauguration. In the book, society is run by The Party which is led by a shady figure called Big Brother - "Big Brother is watching you". The Party uses simplistic slogans to warp reality, like Black is White, 2+2=5, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

George Orwell's '1984' hits bestseller list again

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/24/us/george-orwell-1984-bestseller-trump-trnd/index.html

25 Jan 2017

2017 has been "doubleplusgood" for sales of George Orwell's "1984." The famed dystopian novel of life in a totalitarian state sat at No. 6 on Amazon's bestseller list Tuesday morning. The novel's newfound popularity comes several days after White House press secretary Sean Spicer argued defiantly that Trump's swearing-in Friday drew the largest-ever audience for an inauguration "period," despite obvious photo and statistical evidence to the contrary. Senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway later defended that argument by saying Spicer's false claims were actually "alternative facts." That phrasing was reminiscent of Orwell's "Ministry of Truth," which, he wrote, concerns itself with "lies."

Pope Francis Apostolic Exhortation - 2013 Nov

Pope Francis Series

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html 

Excerpts 

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us. 

No to the new idolatry of money 

We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption. 

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule. 

No to a financial system which rules rather than serves 

Money must serve, not rule! The rich must help, respect and promote the poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and to the return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favors human beings. 

No to the inequality which spawns violence

Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. No political programs or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. The socioeconomic system is unjust at its root, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. 

Today’s economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric. Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve. It serves only to offer false hopes to those clamoring for heightened security, even though we know that weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create new and more serious conflicts. Some simply content themselves with blaming the poor and the poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging in unwarranted generalizations, they claim that the solution is an “education” that would tranquilize them, making them tame and harmless. All this becomes even more exasperating for the marginalized in the light of the widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in their governments, businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.