"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
- Edward Snowden, from the article 'In One Quote, Snowden Just Destroyed the Biggest Myth About Privacy'
[Hat tip Julian Pistorius]
“A proper government is the agent of its citizens, not the master. In its role
as the agent, the default should be openness, not secrecy; in very few
contexts is it appropriate for the government to operate in secrecy. Only
when the government can convince its citizens that secrecy is necessary
for protecting their rights is it acceptable. With respect to the NSA [and
GCSB and SIS] surveillance programs, that burden has not been met.”
- Yaron Brook, YARON BROOK'S POV — NSA MONITORING: SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?
IT HAD BEEN BILLED by Kim DotCon as “The Moment of Truth” – "a political bomb" – THE moment when he would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that John Key knew about DotCon before the raid on his house, and by implication that Key had conspired to get him into the country so as to get him into American hands.
It wasn’t that moment. The shred of evidence DotCon floated earlier yesterday had already been shot down as fraudulent, and nothing more on that score made any appearance at all.
It was billed by Laila Harre as being “framed” by Hager’s #DirtyPolitics, hyped by DotCon’s lawyer as being “Watergate on emails.”
It wasn’t that either (and really never was).
And it was promoted by the likes of Martin/Martyn Bradbury as something that would make your head blow off.
It may well have done that for him (but how would the rest of us ever know the difference.)
There was a wrestle of agendas going on among an ill-sorted collection of folk: a copyright thief keen to make it about him; a political party leader and activists running an election rally; a public launch of the fat German’s “communications suite”; the fat German’s lawyer launching anti-corporate barbs and trying to turn it into an anti-TPPA rally…
Take away the puffery of these poseurs, and the rambling irrelevance of Julian Assange, and in the end what you had was a story presented by Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden that needs sober consideration -- but will hardly get them given the context in which they were put, and the company in which these two global figures allowed themselves to appear.
And there was still a glaring absence of smoking guns.
Snowden claimed NZ’s GCSB as part of Five Eyes has been ramping up towards a system of mass state surveillance which, if true, is worrying. But what was his evidence?
He said the American National Security Agency (NSA) has a base in Auckland “and in the north of the country.” Sounds ominous, but Paul Buchanan suggested this morning the Auckland connection is probably no more than an NSA agent at the American Consulate in Auckland, who may have the services of a satellite dish. The facility up north one assumes is the Warkworth satellite station, which he suggests by implication is subject to monitoring. This deserves further investigation.
Snowden claimed that when working for the NSA in Hawaii he routinely handled metadata from NZ’s GCSB, and could easily drill down into the metadata to investigate content. But he had no specifics, no documentary evidence, just a discussion (on which he had expanded in his Intercept article earlier yesterday) about a checkbox on the XKEYSCORE system used to compile and analyse data.
That solitary checkbox, the Five Eyes Defeat … is what separates our most sacred rights from the graveyard of lost liberty.
Snowden has always appeared genuine, and unlike others at this event appears to understand the importance and basis of “our most sacred rights” – not a gift from government, he said last night, but part of our nature as human beings.
When these things are collected, by any arm of government, without an individualised, particularised suspicion of wrongdoing, on the individual level, that is a violation ... of human rights -- that are not given to us by government,but are inherent to our nature.
He’s right, you know. But unless I missed it somewhere, he’s offered no direct evidence for his claims about mass surveillance in NZ than his testimony last night, his earlier documents about XKEYSCORE, and the reluctance of PMs, leaders of opposition, and former and present heads of GCSB to discuss XKEYSCORE.
He took a swing at the Prime Minister for his public claim that “there is not and there never has been any mass surveillance.” This is false, says Snowden, and only defended now by a Prime Minister “throwing classified documents in the air like Julian Assange.”
Clearly, Snowden sees himself as more careful with classified documents than Julian Assange, and the PM, but he still brought nothing more to back his claims but his cogent discussion and believable demeanour.
If there was a smoking gun last night, it was brought by Glenn Greenwald. While John Key was throwing classified documents in the air defending the non-commissioning of something called CORTEX, Greenwald was documenting a programme called SPEARGUN.
According to Greenwald, [and I’m relying for this summary on Keith Ng’s report] this project involved the "covert installation of 'cable access' equipment" on the Southern Cross cable (i.e. Tapping into New Zealand's traffic with the rest of the world). The existence of this capability cannot be denied.
In response to the Southern Cross cable's operators saying that such a thing was impossible, Snowden (who videoconferenced into the event) asked (I'm paraphrasing): What makes the Southern Cross cable so special that it cannot be accessed undetected by the NSA, when everyone else around the world can be?
The new documents show that the GCSB had a cable access project underway, followed by another document that Phase 1 was "achieved". More crucially, he has a message showing:(TS//SI//NF) New Zealand: GCSB's cable access program SPEARGUN Phase 1; awaiting new GCSB
Act expected July 2013; first metadata probe mid 2013.This shows that they had to wait for the GCSB Act to be passed before SPEARGUN could be used. i.e. The new GCSB Act - the one that supposedly wouldn't expand GCSB powers - expanded GCSB powers to allow them operate a metadata probe on the this cable which they'd tapped.
If there was a case to answer that was presented last night, then that was it.
THE BIGGER PICTURE TO all this is realising that the time-honoured protections against state intrusion into our lives has been breaking down philosophically, legally and politically, just at a time when new technology makes the possibilities of this intrusion so much more widespread.
“We want to bring down Five Eyes,” said the fat German trying to get a chant going. Well, no “we” don’t. In a world with many threats, intelligence gathering is essential.
The reason we have state security is to protect our most sacred liberties – to protect them against the slings and arrows of war and outrageous criminality. That’s government’s job. But to protect our liberties against those agencies themselves, especially as the power of surveillance and analysis increases, we need more than just checkboxes.
It is not a matter of left or right. Yes, the centre-right here are defending the GCSB’s alleged excesses and the left are running the argument against the abuse of power, but reverse political power and the positions would be reversed. The left are always against the abuse of power until they have it themselves. And remember too that this process started here under Helen Clark’s Labour, and has been carried out in US under the Democrats’s Obama.
The issue is not party political. It is protection against the state.
In “the old days” the need to obtain a search warrant was your protection against every state agency except the IRD. But we are now in a new age.
In this new age when searches of your data so much more easy than rummaging through your rubbish bins (as easy as tapping a cable, it seems), and analysis of data is as easy as writing a good data mining algorithm (still not that easy, to be fair) what separates our most sacred rights from the graveyard of lost liberty seems to be only the scruples of security agents themselves – and in New Zealand, so the claim goes, those scruples are being sacrificed for the excitement of being part of a world intelligence network in which New Zealand can be a player just as long as it supplies the (meta)data that keeps it in the big tent.
It is really a time for a new consideration of the checks and balances that tie up the agencies who act purportedly in our defence – and those who think it’s all okay now because a nice man is overseeing date collection might like to contemplate how they might feel if it were all overseen by the former PM, or her successor.
But that sober and serious job needs better “framing” than it did with all the agendas on display last night.
PS: I’ll be updating this post over the day as new info and analysis comes to light.
RELATED POSTS (TODAY):
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TWITTER, AS IT HAPPENED (oldest to newest)…
Centuries ago when bad news had to be delivered to the king, the worst job to have was messenger.
Armenian king Tigranes the Great was said to have executed the first messenger that gavr notice of Roman invasion – “and with no man daring to bring further information, without any intelligence at all, Tigranes sat while war was already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him..." It didn’t stop the invasion.
Cleopatra threatened to treat a messenger's eyes as balls for telling her that Marc Antony had married another. “I bring the news,” said the messenger, “I do not make the match.”
Glenn Greenwald brings uncomfortable news about things the New Zealand security services talked about doing, and possibly did do. He says they were talking about doing this, and possibly getting on with doing it, at the exact point in time the Prime Minister was saying there was nothing doing, and passing laws .
We certainly do need a security service that protects New Zealander’s rights against electronic invasion – the so-called “fifth domain of war” -- the proximate reason Key reckons GCSB wanted to ramp up the collection, distribution and analysis of metadata. But we do not need, and should work while it’s still possible to actively avoid a state that routinely and across the board collects, distributes and analyses the messages, communications and correspondence of all New Zealanders – which is what Greenwald alleges has been going on.
This is not a trivial issue. Historian Scott Powell studies the history of freedom. “Freedom of speech is the key issue in protecting a free society,” he says.
Once we cannot communicate freely, the game is up. Since the Internet is near to being transformed from a mechanism of freedom into the ultimate weapon for control, a turn-key totalitarian state is almost available…”
This is too important to let hatred of one fat German cloud our judgement. Henchman he might be, but If Greenwald has the evidence that Edward Snowden “personally worked with large amounts of metadata on New Zealanders provided to XKeyScore by GCSB,” then there are no two ways about it: The GCSB and the SIS have been lying to us.
And John Key? I say Key wasn’t lying to John Campbell when he said it was "totally incorrect" that laws passed by the Key Government means "the Government effectively through GCSB will be able to wholesale spy on New Zealanders.” He wasn’t lying. He just had no clue he was totally wrong.
Here’s Paul Kelly:
A long but thoughtful guest post by Julian Sanchez on the news story Glenn Greenwald wrote one year ago that would change the world forever.
There had, of course, been no previous shortage of hearings, op-eds, and panels worldwide mulling the appropriate “balance between privacy and security” in the post-9/11 era. But for the masses who lacked a security clearance, these had the character of a middle school playground conversation about sex—a largely speculative discussion among participants who’d learned a few of the key terms, but with only the vaguest sense of the reality they described. Secrecy meant abstraction, and in a conflict between abstract fears and the all-too-visible horror of a burning skyscraper, there could be little question which would prevail. The panoptic infrastructure of surveillance developed well out of public view.
A more meaningfully informed public debate finally became possible via a series of unprecedented disclosures about the global surveillance apparatus operated by the American National Security Agency—disclosures for which the word “leak” seems almost preposterously inadequate. It was a torrent of information, and it gave even the most dedicated newshounds a glimmer of what intelligence officials mean when they complain about “drinking from the fire hose” of planet-spanning communications networks.
Think Edward Snowden is a traitor? Those who say so might like to watch this interview.
[Hat tip Keith Weiner]
UPDATE:
US Media Blacks Out Snowden Interview Exposing Death Threats – SCOOP
The interview, broadcast by the German television network ARD, was largely blacked out by the US media. The New York Times carried not a word of what Snowden said, while the cable and broadcast news programs treated the interview with near total silence.
The American media’s reaction stood in stark contrast to that of both broadcast and print media in Germany, where the interview conducted with Snowden in Russia was treated as a major political event…
Insisting that he acted alone and neither accepted nor required help from any foreign government, he stated: “If I am a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy. Beyond that as far as my personal safety, I’ll never be fully safe until these systems have changed.”
Snowden insisted that what he had done was right, even though the government claims it was a crime, and that what the government is doing is a crime, even though it claims it is legal. He told his interviewer:“I think it’s clear that there are times where what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful. There are times throughout history and it doesn’t take long for either an American or a German to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the government to do things which were not right.”He added that, while he would welcome an opportunity to defend himself in open court, the Obama administration had no intention of allowing him to do so. Rather, it has charged him under the Espionage Act, whose terms would preclude his making any case to a jury that his actions were in the interest of the American people.“So it’s I would say illustrative that the president would choose to say someone should face the music, when he knows that the music is a show trial.”
Guest post by James Ball, Julian Borger, and Glenn Greenwald
U.S. and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.
The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that Internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of Internet traffic — “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the Internet.”
Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with “brute force”, and — the most closely guarded secret of all — collaboration with technology companies and Internet service providers themselves.
Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities — known as backdoors or trapdoors — into commercial encryption software.
The files, from both the NSA and GCHQ, were obtained by The Guardian, and the details are being published today in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. They reveal:
"When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done
|today, then any act of honour or restitution has to be hidden underground."
-Ragnar Danneskjold
The government wants to spy on your communications and harvest your private details. Actually, they already consider they have the power to do that—and have done it to some—now they just want to do it legally.
Their argument is they need to spy on you to protect you.
But this argument falls at the first hurdle. If the “war” they are engaged in involves warding off terrorists, then that war requires naming and targeting the enemy. It does not require, and nor should it involve, a massive spying dragnet on New Zealanders.
The government says it will be careful with the information about us that it harvests.
But the kerfuffle over the public release of journalist Andrea Vance’s private details gives us a clue how little the agents of government value the privacy of our private details. We have their assurance this is not the tip of an iceberg. But people’s private details have been made public in vast numbers by ACC, by the Ministry of Health, and by Paula Bennett’s Ministry of Social Development. “Oops,” they say after it happens. But “oops” doesn’t help those who’ve been blundered upon.
And the news that government departments who extract private information from us will soon be sharing information with the Inland Revenue, the department dedicated to extracting money from us, gives cause for great alarm--particularly in an age when cash-strapped governments will do anything for money, and in the US the Inland Revenue Service has been used by Presidents past and present to frighten and scare off their political enemies.
This is just one reason to spurn the argument that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear from Big Brother monitoring your communications. Because those communications will more and more routinely be used against you to enforce, right or wrong,either the government’s will or the will of those in government.
Consider the revelations that the very journalist who broke a story about illegal spying was snooped on by Parliament’s bureaucrats. “The violation of Vance’s privacy is a prospect now facing every citizen in the country under the GCSB Bill,” says Gordon Campbell, and he’s right. Get offside with the government of the day, and don’t be surprised if your private details become public, whether by design or by incompetence. “The boundaries of privacy are being erased for no discernible reason, and in the absence of any proportionate threat… But who will be watching the watchers [under the new bill]? Why, it will be the same kind of people – in key respects, the very same people – who brought about the Andrea Vance scandal.”
Bullied investigative journalist Jon Stephenson is another local case in point. His communications were allegedly monitored on behalf of the very defence force that a leaked NZ Defence Force document reveals lists investigative journalists as subversive threats. Would you like to be surveilled by the American NSA at the invitation of our Army? Or bullied by the SAS because what you say makes someone uncomfortable?
Kim DotCom is another case in point. What he is alleged to have committed is a crime, fair enough. But while that crime has still yet to be proven, his life has been made public, his property has been stripped, and the NZ government has bent over backwards to give agents of the US government access beyond law, and without proof, to do over a New Zealand citizen.
Which makes the argument ‘we have nothing to worry about’ absurd. Because at the moment the US government’s departments and security agencies are going rogue. Journalists are bugged and surveilled; political campaigners are targeted by the IRS; air travellers are humiliated and delayed; and a programme of drone strikes controlled by the CIA, and apparently monitored by no-one, suggests any idea the powers given them by the PATRIOT Act to fight terrorists has long become simply power itself, exercised for the sake of itself.
Again, you may not like everything about Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, or even Nicky Hager, but if what they and others have been revealing does not leave you using the word “frightening” to describe many of those revelations, then your head is planted more firmly in the sand than Cameron Slater’s fingers are in his ears.
If it was disturbing when we learned Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World hacked people’s phones, then how much more frightening is it when folk are surveilled by people with an arsenal of guns, drones and IRS agents, and not just a basement full of printer’s ink.
When you realise what they can do to you, why would you not think twice about what you’re doing.
Whistle blowers like Manning and Snowden have become heroes to many because what they’ve exposed about illegal hidden government operations would not have appeared in public without them—and what have exposed about legal government operations is frightening. As Ragnar Danneskjold says in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,
"When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honour or restitution has to be hidden underground."
That’s a dangerous place in which to operate.
The Ayn Rand Center’s Yaron Brook makes the relevant final point that only needs one addition to make it local:
A proper government is the agent of its citizens, not the master. In its role as the agent, the default should be openness, not secrecy; in very few contexts is it appropriate for the government to operate in secrecy. Only when the government can convince its citizens that secrecy is necessary for protecting their rights is it acceptable. With respect to the NSA [and GCSB and SIS] surveillance programs, that burden has not been met.
And nor is it likely to be.
GUARDIAN: 'The US government will say I aided our enemies' – video interview: In the second part of an exclusive interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden contemplates the reaction from the US government to his revelations of top-secret documents regarding its spying operations on domestic and foreign internet traffic, email and phone use. This interview was recorded in Hong Kong on 6 June 2013.
From Simon Black’s newsletter this morning…
Ron Paul recently said on his Facebook page:
My understanding is that espionage means giving secret or classified information to the enemy.
Since Snowden shared information with the American people, his indictment for espionage could reveal
(or confirm) that the US Government views you and me as the enemy.
He's right. If nothing else, the way this has played out tells you everything you really need to know about the Land of the Free right now.
Snowden has been demonised by just about every government official on record. US Secretary of State John Kerry called Snowden's actions "despicable and beyond description," while US Senator Lindsey Graham said, "I hope we'll chase him to the ends of the earth..."
Words like "hanging" and "treason" are floating around the mainstream media. It's incredible. The issue no longer has anything to do with the criminality of the government spying programs. But whether Snowden should be shot or hung.
Yet amazingly enough, many polls show that roughly half of Americans think that Snowden is a traitor and should be prosecuted. And among the Twittering classes, the discussion quickly turned to Snowden's 'hot or not' status as a potential sex symbol.
Such data is truly profound. Roughly half of Americans don't give a rat's eye about their own liberty.
And it's obvious that the US government has every intention to continue these programs full speed ahead.
And not just the US government. Documenting some of the NZ government's involvement in this morning's Otago Daily Times, Bruce Munro writes,
This month's revelations by former US National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden have thrown a rare light on the international intelligence community. It is a worldwide web in which New Zealand appears to be an inextricable but willing player.
Peggy Noonan makes the wider argument:
The U.S. surveillance state as outlined and explained by Edward Snowden is not worth the price. Its size, scope and intrusiveness, its ability to target and monitor American [and foreign] citizens, its essential unaccountability—all these things are extreme.
The purpose of the surveillance is enhanced security, a necessary goal to say the least. The price is a now formal and agreed-upon acceptance of the end of the last vestiges of [any] sense of individual distance and privacy from the government. The price too is a knowledge, based on human experience and held by all but fools and children, that the gleanings of the surveillance state will eventually be used by the mischievous, the malicious and the ignorant in ways the creators of the system did not intend. For all we know that's already happened. But of course we don't know: It's secret. Only the intelligence officials know, and they say everything's A-OK.
The end of human confidence in a zone of individual privacy from the government, plus the very real presence of a system that can harm, harass or invade the everyday liberties .... This is a recipe for democratic disaster.
The world has become so caught up in the suspense and intrigue of the Snowden Affair–practically a ready-made Robert Ludlum title–that it seems to have almost forgotten the massive National Security Agency surveillance controversy that he’s risked his future to bring to light…
is as good a time as any to take an intermission from the drama and recall the real story: the biggest global privacy scandal of the decade. Here’s a recap of Snowden’s leaked documents published so far, in my own highly subjective order of importance.
While his successful flight from America has so far indicated that the US can’t always lay a finger on you (so far, at least), what’s been revealed in the information he’s released indicates that they can listen to you wherever you are in the world, and no matter who you are in the world.
And add to that the further revelation that to spy on one’s own citizens “legally,” all that is necessary is a reciprocal deal with another country’s spooks—and everyone outside the US needs to worry about the NSA as much as those within.
As new technology gives the surveillance state more power, it’s even more important to constrain the state. This guest post by Jeffrey Tucker examines the latest revelations of how far, and how many, the modern state is surveilling.
"If They Want to Get You, They Will Get You in Time"
What a few days it's been, like watching a global prize-fight of epic proportions, with every conceivable side throwing the hardest possible punches.
It began with the first leak in the U.K.'s Guardian, which was echoed in The Washington Post. The specific allegation was that the National Security Administration has obtained "direct access" to all communications records of every American [and “likely” every New Zealander] by working directly with Verizon, Google, Facebook, and every other major provider.
That revelation, courtesy of journalist Glenn Greenwald, that the NSA demanded that Verizon turn over all its records on an "ongoing" basis kicked it all off. The Washington Post published a PowerPoint presentation on a program called PRISM, created in 2007 as an effort to collect and store data on every American.
Then, the denials came from the websites and providers. They called the revelations outrageous and ridiculous.
"We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers."
"Google does not have a back door for the government."
Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM."
They all said the same thing. They provide information to the government only in response to specific warrants from the government, and they frequently fight against them.
But skeptics noted that they parsed their words carefully. The phrase "direct access" kept coming back. Besides, what if they are under some legal obligation to lie about what the government knows and can know? Worse, what if the NSA has a direct portal to their services and even the CEOs don't know about it?
Is this paranoia at work? Well, the Obama administration did everything it could to fuel the frenzy even further, not by denying or denouncing the spy state, but by blasting the leaker himself!
"The unauthorized disclosure of a top-secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation," said James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence. For this reason, he found the revelations "gut-wrenching" -- not the information contained therein, but that fact of its release!
Clapper joined the whole bureaucracy of spooks to swear he would get this leaker. That response seriously backfired by seeming to confirm all the truth of the leak itself -- making the CEOs look like liars or fools.
A manhunt began.
Then suddenly, it ended.
The leaker himself -- an articulate and compelling young man named Edward Snowden -- posted a YouTube video that sets a new standard for what is considered "viral."
This 29-year-old genius worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor with the NSA that advertised its data-collection and storage services. Booz, which employs 25,000 people, has a revolving door with the national security state: The past head of the NSA now works at Booz, just as the current director of National Intelligence once worked at Booz.
Snowden was not the product of an elite education. He had been a code geek who never bothered much with the classroom. He had signed up for the Army, but became disillusioned and was fortunate enough to be discharged. He then worked for the CIA and, finally, with the NSA. He could no longer stand what he was seeing: the sheer intrusiveness, the aggressiveness, the presumption that the data of every citizen belongs to the government.
So he took information about the PRISM program and the NSA's ambitions. Then he left. Then he leaked. That he would reveal himself on camera for the world to see -- in temporary safety in Hong Kong -- is nothing short of marvellous and thrilling for its sheer heroism.
In this interview, he explains why he decided to expose the "architecture of oppression." He confirms the worst fear: "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal email."
Here is the full interview. You can immediately see that this wonderful young person is just like you and me, or perhaps our sons and daughters. This is the real thing. And his response to what he saw around him was completely normal. He just began to feel really squeamish about what was going on.
Q: Do you have a plan in place?
A: "The only thing I can do is sit here and hope the Hong Kong government does not deport me... My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland. They stood up for people over Internet freedom. I have no idea what my future is going to be.
"They could put out an Interpol note. But I don't think I have committed a crime outside the domain of the U.S. I think it will be clearly shown to be political in nature."Q: Do you think you are probably going to end up in prison?
A: "I could not do this without accepting the risk of prison. You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will."Q: How do you feel now, almost a week after the first leak?
A: "I think the sense of outrage that has been expressed is justified. It has given me hope that, no matter what happens to me, the outcome will be positive for America. I do not expect to see home again, though that is what I want."
Listening to him, you hear the voice of a new generation. There is no fear. There a humane quality to his thinking. He believes in openness. He thinks that one person can make a difference. He has the human right to try. His voice, to me, is akin to that of Rose Wilder Lane in her great book The Discovery of Freedom.
And fortunately, today, using the very communication systems that government is apparently so dedicated to monitoring, he was able to get his message out to the entire world -- without gatekeepers like the NSA.
His approach of going out into the open this way is itself fascinating. He probably figures that he is safer doing it this way than finding a spider hole somewhere in which to live, where he would eventually be found and then shot. Going public allowed him to control the message. It affords him the best chance to make a difference.
This is bravery, but he is probably correct that it is more effective and safe.
His example should be instructive for anyone who is following the stream of revelations and trying to sort out the meaning of it all. One response is to shut down in feature, to stop using Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and even your smartphone. You can drop out of modernity completely, move to Walden, and hide until you die.
To me, that is not an answer. In effect, that is letting the surveillance state win. Your quality of life is destroyed, and to what end? They can still get you if they want you. A smarter and better approach is to use all services but remember what everyone should have figured out long ago. The Internet is a public medium. If you want secrecy, you have to use public-key cryptography with services like Cryptocat and the Tor browser.
Snowden himself sums up this view: "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,"
We'll know more in the coming months precisely about the nature of the data collection going on. But that anyone should be shocked about the NSA's goals and methods is supremely naive. The first major book on the NSA that exposed its goal came out fully 30 years ago (The Puzzle Palace, by James Bamford). Nor should anyone believe that the purpose of all this surveillance is to "protect our nation."
The purpose is to protect the state.
There ought to be a hall of fame for people who have made huge strides in the fast-forward breakdown of the nation-state in the digital age. Julian Assange. Bradley Manning. Cody Wilson. And now Edward Snowden. The times when the powers that be could just "body bag" a person like this are (hopefully) over. Today, this man is probably more popular than every member of Congress, and certainly more popular than his agency-based oppressors.
If you want to understand the rational, sensible attitude of truth-telling defiance that shapes the mind and life of a man like Snowden, read The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane. It will change your mind.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Tucker
Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, and the author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo and It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes.
This post first appeared at the Laissez Faire Book Club.
