Permanent Record
Whether you support partial surveillance or mass surveillance (called ‘bulk collection’ in US language), it’s clear you can’t get out of it completely given such a digitally connected world.
Snowden gave up his family, friends, country and his whole life to drive home a simple point: Data privacy is a very real concern worldwide and there is a reason he did what he did. He goes on to say that in the coming few years, it is perhaps the biggest concern for all countries and could be the changing medium of ‘defence’ among them.
It takes someone passionate about the principles they hold dear to do something that he did. The fact that he pulled it off is in itself daring. I am not sure what the future holds but the conversation this ignited is slowly changing the way governmental control should work. Democratic governments throughout the world discussing privacy as a natural right and EU putting this principle to practice are all consequences of that single whistleblowing move.
It is scary how much of what he envisioned is slowly becoming a reality now. The power of complete surveillance in this age is so strong that it is no longer educated guesses but subtle coercion. Do you want it? No. Do you know it? No. Can you stop it? No. Is it going to decrease? No. Then where is freedom?
In the context of policy, behavioral extrapolation amounts to manipulation and you are no longer thinking what you are supposed to be thinking.
It is a well-written and moving rationale for his actions and will make you sit straight to think about where you could be compromised. Snowden falls under the classical dilemma between the textbook definition of righteousness and personal morality. In 2013, people chose their sides based on where their loyalties lied but with time, most of them have started to see the sense. I still don’t think he is safe given how much effort it took to release this book but this is a required start. If you are heavily invested in digital technology in terms of time and money, this is an educational read to truly get the depth of what you are giving up.
There are a lot of hard-hitting words in this book but some that I liked the most:
“ Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. “
“ Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy. “
“ We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary. We can’t let the godlike surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our citizenship scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes. And as for our most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to identify us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us-to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image of the technology that seeks its control. Of course, all of the above has already happened. “
Originally published at http://mumblingmadrasi.wordpress.com on May 15, 2020.
