NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s recent remarks on the perils of mass surveillance — broadcast by the UK’s Channel 4 television as an “alternative Christmas message” — are an eloquent reminder of the fragility of fundamental political freedoms, even in societies that pride themselves on being open and democratic. Unruffled by the saga that has deterred so much of the US media from acknowledging the importance of his disclosures, Snowden says the espionage routinely carried out by US and British intelligence services foreshadows a dystopia more troubling than the one imagined by George Orwell. If present excesses continue, he warns: “A child born today will grow up without any conception of privacy at all. They will never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, unrecorded and unanalyzed.” Privacy, he reminds us, matters; it “allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”
Snowden has been unexpectedly successful at publicizing problems hiding in plain sight. Long before he leaked NSA documents, several prominent American news agencies had published exposés of the country’s espionage-industrial complex. But detailed accounts of what the Nation media critic Reed Richardson has called “a vast, metastasizing national security state obsessed with classifying secrets, broadening its power, and increasingly reliant on private contractors” failed to set off the necessary debates. Richardson notes that the cloak-and-dagger backstory which brought Snowden and his leaks such notoriety ought to be a cautionary tale to the American public that “in-depth accountability journalism doesn’t always make an impact.” He argues, persuasively, that Snowden’s ability to overcome public indifference to news it ought to find shocking is the main reason “why the ongoing blowback of the NSA spying revelations …—the “Snowden effect”—[is] so remarkable.”
Snowden’s leaks have shown, irrefutably, how irresponsibly the US has leveraged its advantages in technology – most of the world’s data passes, at some point, through US-owned infrastructure – to spy on individuals, companies and governments. These abuses should concern anyone who uses the internet. In a recent TED talk on the implications of the NSA leaks, the data security expert Mikko Hypponen notes that although “US intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners … In fact, 96 percent of the planet are foreigners.” It is true that other countries have accorded themselves similar permissions to sift through digital traffic, but America’s current dominance of the Internet makes its intrusions far more consequential. Taking Sweden as an example of this asymmetry, Hypponen points out that all of its “decision makers and politicians and business leaders” likely use U.S.-based services like Windows or OSX … Facebook or LinkedIn, or store their data in clouds like iCloud.” But it is hard to imagine that any important US officials rely on Swedish services to protect their sensitive data. Given this imbalance, it is not hard to see how the NSA’s nearly unrestricted access to the rest of the world’s data could easily erode global trust in the trustworthiness of services that rely on the Internet.
Despite its shameful treatment of Snowden so far, there are signs that the US government has grasped the importance of the issues which animate him. In October James Sensenbrenner, one of the leading intellectual authors of the Patriot Act – which set the stage for many of the NSA’s current excesses – sponsored a bipartisan initiative to improve oversight of the intelligence community. A few days ago a report from President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology put forward recommendations that would rein in the spy agencies which have not only violated the spirit of the US Constitution but also repeatedly deceived Congress about the extent to which they have done so. The report unequivocally addresses one of Snowden’s most damaging revelations – that US spy agencies deliberately weakened encryption software – by urging the US government to stop “undermining efforts to create encryption standards… mak[e] clear that it will not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable [existing] encryption… [and to support] efforts to encourage the greater use of encryption technology for data in transit, at rest, in the cloud, and in storage.”
Whether the US legislature will honour these promises remains to be seen, but the fact that none of these developments was politically feasible just six months ago is a measure of how effective Edward Snowden has been at asking where privacy ends and national security begins. In a 14-hour interview granted to the Washington Post a few days ago he memorably says: “I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.” By raising these questions as forcefully within America, as he has done among its geopolitical rivals and allies, Snowden has asked every society to revisit the technological optimism which has so often infantilized discussions of the role the Internet should play in modern societies, and he has breathed new life into the debate over the extent to which any government should be allowed to compromise the privacy and freedom of expression of its citizens in the name of national security. At the end of his Christmas broadcast he asks his audience to “[r]emind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel asking is always cheaper than spying.” That simple truth is one we should all do well to remember.
