This post is a summary of three articles. The first with the title above, was published in 2013 http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/10/a-necessary-evil-what-it-takes-for-democracy-to-sur. The second was written by Ramez Naam with the title of, "Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?" In 2014 and published at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/can-we-avoid-a-surveillance-st.html. The third was written in 2013 and published at http://www.salon.com/2013/10/01/greenwald_surveillance_powe
Thanks to Edward Snowden`s disclosures, we know that the current level of surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use. The repeated harassment and prosecution of dissidents, sources, and journalists only provides confirmation. We need to reduce the level of surveillance, but how far? Where exactly is the maximum tolerate level, beyond which it becomes oppressive? That happens when surveillance interferes with the functioning of democracy. If whistleblowers do not dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred to effective control over our governments. That is why surveillance that anables the state to find out who has talked with a reporter is too much surveillance, too much for democracy to endure. The EFF (Eletronic Frontier Foundation) propose a set of legal principles designed to prevent the abuses of surveillance. These principles include, crucially, explicit protection for whistleblowers, as a consequence, they would be adequate for protecting democratic freedoms, if adopted completely and enforced without exception.
The last year has brought with it the revelations of massive government spying in the U.S. and U.K. On the horizon is more technology that will make it even more easier for governments to monitor and track everything that citizens do. Yet, if we are motivated and sufficiently clever, the future can be one of more freedom rather than less. In fact, an oppressive state that used technologies to control the populace far longer than that. George Orwell published "1984" in 1948. Aldous Huxley published "Brave New World" in 1932, and while this is remembered more for predicting controlled biological engineering of the masses, it also features government surveillance, media manipulation, and thought control. So, this is an old idea. Yet, the arc of history has bent towards more freedom. There are two separate tools to win back and extend our freedoms. And both are fronts that need to be pushed on. One is the nature of technology itself, and its tendency to grow cheaper and spread into more hands. The other is democracy. Clive Thompson`s book, "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better," he talks about one of the influences on Orwell in writing "1984": Joseph Stalin`s manipulation of history. Over the course of his rule of the USSR, Stalin purged millions of people. Among them, were important officials who appeared in pictures with him. Stalin, not content with merely executing his former friends, wanted them out of history. So, he employed a staff of photo editors to simply remove any evidence that these men had ever existed. Then, one by one, as the men fall out of favor and as they are killed, Stalin removed them. This terrified Orwell. If a dictator can do this, if he can re-write history, he could even re-write the present. He could lie to the people with total impunity. What Clive Thompson points out is that something different has happened. It is actually become harder for governments to lie to the people, instead of easier. What is happening is that the tech is not just in the hands of the state, or the super rich. Tech gets cheap, fast. At least digital tech does. And as it gets cheap, it gets into more and more hands. It brings additional skills and capabilities to a wider set of people. So, all power must be held in check. So, is it possible for us to actually act, as citizens in democracies, to curtail the power of intelligence and police agencies? In the 1960s, the abuses of the FBI were many, consider just one example. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, had a personal dislike for Martin Luther King and for the Civil Rights movement, so he bugged every MLK`s hotel rooms. In so doing, Hoover turned up evidence that MLK was having an affair, Seeing his chance, he tried to blackmail MLK. More than half of Americans now believe the NSA has gone too far. That political swing is a direct result of the tech trends that made Snowden`s massive leak possible, and thus enabled the drumbeat of news that kept it on poeple`s minds. Politics and technology interact and feedback on each other. Will that be enough to drive change? The question is how much.
Since June, the release of NSA documents, leaked by Snowden has shed new and outrage-fueling light on the U.S. government`s near totalized surveillance of communications within and going out of the U.S. "Surveillance=Power. The more you know about someone, the more you can control and manipulate them in all sorts of ways. That is one reason a surveillance state is so menacing to basic political liberties." wrote Greenwald, essentially revealing the undergirding principle behind reporting on the extent of the surveillance state. For Greenwald, and rightly so, the question of surveillance gets to the heart of shadowy operations of governmentality and control.
