This post is a summary of three articles. The first with the title above was published in September of 2013 at http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19039-without-privacy-there-can-be-no-democracy. The second was published in March of 2014 at http://www.dw.de/surveillance-a-symptom-of-unchecked-power/a-17488914. The third was published in June of 2014 at http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Clare-Curran-Without-rights-to-privacy-there-is-democracy/tabid/721/articleID/4882
The president of Brazil, Dilma Roussef, spoke this morning at the United Nations and delivered a powerful indictment of spying by the NSA on behalf of U.S. She said, "without respect for a nation's sovereignty, there is no basis for proper relations among nations." While most Americans see this as a rift between Brazil in the U.S. over the issue of our spying on them, President Roussef highlighted the most important point of all in her speech this morning. She said, "without the right of privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of opinion, and so there is no actual democracy." This is not just true of international relations. It is also true within the U.S. Back before the Kennedy administration put an end to it, Edgar Hoover administration was infamous in political circles in Washington DC for his spying on and blackmailing of both Americans politicians and activists like Martin Luther King. He even sent M.L.K. tapes of an extramarital affair and suggest that M.L.K. should consider committing suicide. That was a shameful period in American history, and most Americans think it is behind us. But the NSA, and other intelligence agencies have put the practice of spying on average citizens in America. As Brazil's President points out, without privacy there can be no democracy. Democracy requires opposing voices, it requires a certain level of reasonable political conflict. And it requires that people committing acts of journalism can do so without being spied upon. Perhaps a larger problem is that well over half of the NSA's budget has been outsourced to private corporations. These private corporations maintain an army of lobbyists in Washington DC who constantly push for more spying, more money for their clients. We need a new Commission to investigate the nature and scope of our government spying both on our citizens and on our allies. But even more than that we need to go back to the advice that President Dwight Eisenhower gave us as he left the presidency in 1961. He warned about the rise of a military-industrial complex, suggesting that the search for profits, override the protective mechanisms that keep government answerable to its people. Government is the protector of the commons. Government is of by and for we the people. Government must be answerable to the people. As the world recognizes the Day Against Cyber-Censorship, we looks at a pair of countries that have long struggled with the issue. Internet users in Iran and China have known for years that they are under surveillance. Revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden made it clear to people around the world that their digital communications are being tracked and saved by the U.S. spy agency. That was one of the reasons why the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ were included on the 2014 list of enemies of the internet published by Reporters Without Borders. "The mass surveillance employed, many of them exposed by NSA whistleblower Snowden, are all the more intolerable because they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information," the report said. "How will so-called democratic countries be able to press for the protection of journalists if they adopt the very practices they are criticizing authoritarian regimes for?" Despite some minor loosening of restrictions under Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, authorities in Iran have continued to develop a "national Internet", that would cut off access to material deemed unacceptable, the report said. Filtering content, controlling Internet service providers, intercepting communications, staging cyber-attacks and imprisoning bloggers and Internet activists are common practice in Iran, Reporters Without Borders wrote."The general reaction is to describe how horrific the Iran's National Internet is, everyone calls for it to be abandoned,"said Abadpour, a jury member of 'The Bobs,' https://thebobs.com/portugues/ DW's award for online activism. Such a national network, which provides services to people in Iran without connecting them to the wider, public Internet, could be developed with help of the Chinese Internet authorities responsible for creating the country's Great Firewall, which for years has censored or filtered online material from Internet users in China. At a time when messages can cross the Internet nearly instantaneously and when Internet data is growing, the government does not have the resources to monitor all Internet activity, which makes self-censorship especially powerful for the Chinese government, according to Hu Yong, a chinese media critic and jury member of The Bobs. In addition to having what Reportes Without Borders calls the world's most sophisticated Internet censorship system, China is also the world's biggest prison for online activists, with "at least 70 online information providers currently in prison because of their Internet activities." The http://www.wefightcensorship.org/, a project run by Reporters Without Borders, list 166 online activists in prison around the world, plus another three killed this year. But all the nations listed in the Enemies of the Internet report share one feature: the excesses of surveillance and censorship lie in a few people being able to determine what the public can read, write, and comment on, Abadpour said.
Democracy is an accomplishement and wholly valued, but without rights to privacy thre is no democracy. Chilean novelist and human rights activists Ariel Dorfman said, "Surveillance, in any land where it is ubiquitous and inescapable, generates distrust and divisions among its citizens, curbs their readiness to speak freely to each other, and diminishes their willingness to even dare to think freely." Edward Snowden's revelations on the full extent of global surveillance have had a chilling effect on the democracy ideal of privacy, an ideal which Snowden asserts a child born today will have no notion of. We are becoming a networked society in which surveillance has become quotidian and data mining commonplace. Social media, which can be seen as a leading vehicle in the exchange of personal information, has complicated cybersecurity. We are now reliant on digital technology. That reliance is being manipulated, subjecting us to the arbitrary powers of companies and government, and undermining the secure storage of our data in order to make way for increased surveillance. Increasingly there has been a dissonance between security and privacy in the digital rights. Any prospective government must make the internet off-limits policy to government interference.
