On last Thrusday, the world press marked the first birthday of the revelations of Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee, with many articles about privacy violations. Since September 11 2001, a lot of people suspected about privacy violations, but for the first time, somebody from the inside the system had the courage to show many evidences about that violations, after all transparency is not what the talking is about. This post is a summary of two articles. The first published almost one year ago, the title is above http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2145506,00.html. The second with the title of, "Why NSA IT guy Edward Snowden leaked top secret documents." Published in October 2013 at http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/06/10/why-nsa-it-guy-edward-snowden-leaked-top-se
The 21st century mole sees himself as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him. Rather, it is an online political philosophy that attract his imagination. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas. "The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong," said Edward Snowden, who admitted on June 6 to one of the most significant thefts of highly classified secrets in U.S. history. The documents he turned over to the press revealed a massive program to compile U.S. telephone records into a database for investigations. Another program has given the NSA access to records at major online providers like Google and Facebook to search information on suspects. The secret program has been under way for seven years. The NSA infrastructure was built to protect the nation against foreign enemies and the spies they recruit. Computer geeks like Snowden, with utopian ideas of how the world should work, scramble those assumptions. Just as antiwar protest of the Vietnam era argued that peace not war, was the natural state of man, this new breed of technophiles believes that transparency and personal privacy are the foundations of a free society. Secrecy and surveillance, therefore, are gateways to tyranny. And in the face of tyranny, the leakers believe, rebellion is noble. Snowden explained in a video interview the reasons for his actions, with a hint of serenity, even as he described how he could be killed by the CIA. He characterized the surveillance systems he exposed as "turnkey tyranny" and warned of what would be happen if the safeguards now in place ever fell away. He hoped to force a public debate, to set the information free. "This is the truth. This is what is happening," he said. Three years earlier, a 22 year-old Army analyst stationed in Iraq named Bradley Manning offered a nearly identical defense for a similar breach of military secrets. Both young men grew up in the wake of the security crackdown that followed the September 11 attacks. They had come of age online, in virtual communities where this new antiauthority, free-data ideology was hardening. That hacktivist ethos is growing around the world, driven in large part by young hackers who are increasingly disrupting all manner of institutional power with online protest. "That is the most optimistic thing that is happening, the radicalization of the internet-educated youth, people who are receiving their values from the internet, this is the political education of apolitical technical people and it is extraordinary " said Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Today that same defiant spirit still dominates large swaths of the internet. Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor who has written extensively about cyberculture said, "there was always this kind of tech-hacker ethos, which was probably libertarian, which has collided with this antiauthoritarian political impulse." In the days after the Snowden disclosures, a coalition of 86 groups, including online communities like Reddit and BoingBoing, signed on to an open petition to Congress calling the NSA programs unconstitutional. A petition filed with WhiteHouse.gov calling on Obama to pardon Snowden reached 60,000 names in three days. Sales of George Orwell`s novel 1984 have soared. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, founded a legal-defense fund for Snowden. And a recent online video campaign, with Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone and actors such as Peter Sarsgaard and several journalists, has been organizing a social media campaign called "I am Bradley Manning," The threat of more leaks is likely to grow as young people come of age in the defiant culture of the internet and new, principled martyrs like Snowden seize the popular imagination. "These backlashes usually provoke political mobilization and a deepening of commitments," said Gabriela Coleman, a professor at University in Montreal, who is finishing a book on Anonymous, "I kind of feel we are at the dawn of it."
Many people see objectionable practices in their workplaces. Most grumble to colleagues or complain to a spouse. Why did Snowden decide to share what he saw with the world, torpedoing his $200,000 job, forcing him to flee the country, and risking a lifetime in prison. He has been interviewed by th Guardian and by the Washington Post about why he leaked the documents, here a collection of his quotes explaining his motivation: He said, "the majority of people spend time interacting with the internet, and governments are abusing their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate. I believe that the greatest danger to our freedom and a threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs. I will be satisfied if the secret laws, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for a instante. An explanation of the motivations behind these disclosures outside the democratic model. My motive is to inform the public to which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The debate which will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in. If you realize that is the world you helped create and it is going to get worse with the next generation who can extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize you might be willing to accept any risk. I can not in good conscience allow the government to destroy privacy, internet freedom, and basic liberties. Even if you are not doing anything wrong, you eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call and then they can use the system to attack you on that basis to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. I do not want to live in a world where there is no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."
Many people see objectionable practices in their workplaces. Most grumble to colleagues or complain to a spouse. Why did Snowden decide to share what he saw with the world, torpedoing his $200,000 job, forcing him to flee the country, and risking a lifetime in prison. He has been interviewed by th Guardian and by the Washington Post about why he leaked the documents, here a collection of his quotes explaining his motivation: He said, "the majority of people spend time interacting with the internet, and governments are abusing their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate. I believe that the greatest danger to our freedom and a threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs. I will be satisfied if the secret laws, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for a instante. An explanation of the motivations behind these disclosures outside the democratic model. My motive is to inform the public to which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The debate which will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in. If you realize that is the world you helped create and it is going to get worse with the next generation who can extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize you might be willing to accept any risk. I can not in good conscience allow the government to destroy privacy, internet freedom, and basic liberties. Even if you are not doing anything wrong, you eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call and then they can use the system to attack you on that basis to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. I do not want to live in a world where there is no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."
