IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, EDWARD SNOWDEN WRITES:
"The freedom of a country can only be measured by
its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction that these
rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and
when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual
freedoms that…during the Internet Revolutions is called 'privacy.'” (6-7)
He states that the “system of
near-universal surveillance” his work in part helped establish, “had been set
up not just without our consent, but in a way that deliberately hid every
aspect of its programs from our knowledge. At every step, the changing
procedures and their consequences were kept from everyone, including most
lawmakers.” (6)
The title, “Permanent Record”
refers to one of Edward Snowden’s chief concerns with the "Intelligence
Community" (IC) where he spent more than a decade working—namely that all the
information this vast spy system compiled about its citizens was collected—as
his revelations proved—illegally and kept indefinitely: phone calls, text
messages, emails, web searches and so on, all the electronic communications
that most of us think of as private were (and quite probably still are) housed
in banks of servers hidden away in secret, underground bunkers.
In the United States the NSA,
the National Security Agency, is tasked with guarding “signals” espionage, that is the new-school
form of spying that has come to compete with the old school ‘shoe-leather and
mail-drop’ version of Spy vs Spy, that we
grew up with as kids. (At least I did.) Snowden is of the generation that
helped bring computer technologies forward to serve America’s spymasters. He came of
age during the rise of the personal computer and the internet (he’s 30 years
old or so today). A precocious youth, at school he was an indifferent student
and his brilliance was reserved for his personal studies of computers and
internet protocols, and of course “hacking”. The online world of chat-rooms, web
searches and trying to understand how all these new technologies worked, and worked
together, absorbed his young, inquisitive mind. One humorous incident Snowden
recounts is when he hacked into the Los Almos National Laboratory and was
horrified to find that many of their electronic directories containing
information on classified atomic research were easily accessible to the public.
If he could so get in, so could the Russians! He left a voicemail at the public
inquiries' hotline to warn them of their security vulnerabilities. His equally horrified
parents (both of whom were government employees—his mother worked for a time at
the NSA as a low-level supoort staff; his father worked for the coast guard in
an administrative capacity) received a visit from a pair of
bemused FBI agents verifying young Snowden’s story. His talents for computer programming were already obvious, and he continued along this path, growing
his knowledge of system analysis, eventually becoming a “system’s engineer”
with the NSA.
Snowden is a true
“whistle-blower”. As a young adult and a person of conscience, he came to
realize the growing capacity of organizations such as the NSA* to operate
increasingly in the dark with less and less governmental oversight.
At the same time, he was a rather conservative
young man. His family background was one of government and military service
going back generations. He grew up in
the area around Washington D.C. called “the Beltway” where many military and
government workers made their homes. Secrecy, or at least a tendency for most
residents to keep things close to your chest, was the environment that shaped his formative years. Later, he would later excel at developing security protocols for the
security agency’s computer networks, as well as developing systems that helped the NSA store
vast quantities of electronic information. Information, that is, about you and
me. In particular, the NSA was interested in what it termed “metadata”:
"The
terms prefix “meta” which traditionally is translated as “above” or “beyond” is
here used in the sense of “about”: metadata is data about data. It is, more
accurately, data that is made by data—a cluster of tags and markers that allow
data to be useful. The most direct way of thinking about metadata, however, is
as “activity data,” all the records of all the things you do on your devices
and all the things your devices do on their own. Take a phone call for example:
its metadata might include the date and time of the call, the call’s duration,
the number from which the call was made, the number being called and their
locations. An emails' metadata might include information about what type of
computer it was generation on, where, and when, who the computer belonged to,
who sent the email, who received it, where and when it was sent and received
and who, if anyone, besides the sender and recipient accessed it, and where and
when. Metadata can tell your surveillant the address you slept at last night
and what time you got up this morning. It reveals every place you visited
during your day and how long you spent there. It shows who you were in touch
with and who was in touch with you.” (179)
In his autobiography, Edward
Snowden comes across as a principled, introspective and thoughtful person. He
strongly believed that democracy is “the one form of governance that most fully
enables people of different backgrounds to live together, equal before the
law.” (207) His experience in the Intelligence Community, in the years
he worked as a “contractor”—on the payroll and listed as an employee of such firms as Dell
Computers, but in reality working in facilities run by the CIA and NSA—increasingly
laid bare for him the institutional practices and technologies that, he came to feel,
threatened his country’s democracy and trampled on the civil liberties of its
citizens. As revelatory as his exposé of the hidden surveillance activities of
these vast bureaucracies was, I found equally interesting his descriptions of his
job path, and the organizations, groups, bureaucratic mazes and hidden hierarchies he
encountered.
For those unfamiliar with
Snowden’s story, he provided Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glen Greenwald
and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, with details of the NSA’s illegal
data-collection activities. In 2013, having fled ahead of American authorities, he found
himself trapped in Moscow’s international airport, in diplomatic limbo for several months, his
American passport having been revoked by the State Department. Russia finally granted him
asylum, and there he remains, wanted in the United States on charges of espionage.
His revelations made real for
many the fears of what today’s new technologies might mean, especially when our governments (and for that matter, our large corporations) act
in overreach their authority. While there were congressional investigations
into wrongdoings on the part of the NSA and other American IC agencies, resulting from Snowden's revelations, and new laws in
the United States were established, I am far from certain this story is over.
Here, in Canada, we must not be complacent about what our own government is
capable of doing in the name of “national security.” Instead of being branded a traitor and criminal, Edward Snowden should be given a medal!
Be vigilant and be aware that Big Brother
may indeed be watching! And check out the HBO flic based on Snowden's revelations, Citizenfour.
Cheers, Jake.
*The United States, Great
Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand intelligence pact—the
so-called “Five Eyes” network—share information that their electronic spy agencies gather. The Canadian branch,
CSIS, in the recent past has come under criticism for sharing information about a
Canadian citizen travelling abroad where he
was subsequently—illegally—transported to a third country where he was subjected
to torture as a possible “terrorist”. Court proceedings in Canada following his release led
to the government compensating him financially for his mistreatment. I have no
reason to assume that such privacy and even human rights abuses do not still continue. Once such
powerful technologies are acquired, it is difficult to get the holders of these
technologies to relinquish them. As Edward Snowden discovered, they are too
tempting not to use. And abuse.
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