They are watching you. Well maybe not watching right this moment. But in
the future, if you ever became a person of interest for whatever reason, they
could go back in their files and find everything you’ve done all the way up to
this point. It has all been recorded and handed over to the government
surveillance through secret court orders. This is no conspiracy theory. It is a
fact of the times we live in. And we know this because of a hero, ex-NSA
contractor Edward Snowden who provided journalists, Laura Poitras and Glenn
Greenwald, in the summer of 2013 the internal classified documents of the NSA
to prove it.
“CitizenFour” recently won the Oscar for Best Documentary. This is not a
particularly great documentary in terms of craft or creativity, but it is the
most important in terms of sheer newsworthiness. That week in June when all the
stories were leaked and Snowden came out as the whistleblower is going to be in
history books. This movie shows the entire week from beginning to end all in a
Hong Kong hotel room. Someone needs to put a plaque right next to door
commemorating the event. I suspect it will become a cult tourist destination.
It is on my list if I ever go back to Hong Kong.
To truly appreciate what Snowden did it is best to understand how he
went about doing it. To do this I suggest watching Alex Gibney’s documentary
“We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks,” which concerns the whistleblowing
of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. Those two were rank amateurs way over
their heads compared to the competence and eloquence of Greenwald, Poitras, and
Snowden. Unlike the Wikileaks whistleblowing which just flopped a bunch of
sensitive material on the internet for all to see, Snowden took special care to
make sure the documents he was revealing put nobody from the intelligence
community in physical danger. It was an overview of programs not an outing of
personnel. Secondly, Snowden took responsibility in a heroic way. He kept his
girlfriend, family, and co-workers out of his plans. He coordinated with
journalists with good reputations. And he was determined to not be anonymous
like Bradley Manning. The documents were leaked in Glen Greenwald’s and Laura
Poitra’s newspapers throughout the week in deliberate sequencing and then
Snowden was revealed at the end. In this way the story was always about the
secret surveillance, the news cycle gave utmost attention to each reveal, and
just when the story was about to switch over to who was doing this and why,
Snowden came out and made the mystery a moot point. It was a brilliant strategy
and a true thrill to sit in that hotel room with them and watch very smart
people plot the strategy for important historical things in real time. Edward
Snowden comes off as good a person someone can come off as in this movie. Where
he really shines is in his aptitude in discussing all the programs and the
power and capabilities of the technology in them. He knows his stuff and he
knows that he is tapping Leviathan on the shoulder and asking for a fight. But
he has thought this through. His motives are pure. His actions are important.
And the journalists he has allied with are the best in the business. Contrast
that with the disturbed loose cannon that was Bradley Manning and the
overconfident narcissism of Julian Assange and you have a master’s class on how
to and how not to be a whistleblower. Did anyone say double feature partytime?
The subject of the NSA for anyone who has the experience of reading a
Bamford book is especially taxing to the mind. It is a story of complex
technology and large warehouses and confusing cryptology. It is almost
impossible to stay awake during these stories without wanting to latch onto a
personality. (This is generally the public’s large problem with this national
security problem. One of Snowden’s main points is not in the government’s
actions towards specific people [although 1.2 million people are identified as
being on the ‘terrorist’ watchlist] but the capabilities that the government
has set up. Imagine he says if the people in charge really wanted to do really
bad things. They could very well do it quite easily. There is nowhere to hide
and the checks and balances in the system are a complete joke. [The secret FISA
court only denied less than 1% of all requests from the intelligence community
for search warrants. That is what you call a rubberstamp.]) To that end Poitras
does a rather keen thing in narrating the story in the first person when
dealing with her experience with Snowden. The way she describes being put on a
‘watchlist’ for being a journalist who talked about these things is rather
chilling. Unfortunately (and rather oddly) we never actually see Poitras during
the documentary. Why she chose to narrate in the first person (putting herself
into the story) without putting herself on the screen is an odd choice. She is
missed.
Remember that Steven Spielberg movie, “Minority Report,” starring Tom
Cruise. It was about a future police state that had achieved a zero murder rate
by using precogs to predict murders and stop them before they happened. The
movie took the stance that this type of surveillance and its effects was not
worth the loss of privacy. Really? A zero murder rate? Not worth the loss of
privacy. It was an odd position I thought to take. What I felt was really wrong
about the future police state was that the people who were stopped from
committing the crimes were still punished for them. They were warehoused in an
enforced deep sleep that seemed to me to be even worse than solitary
confinement. That, I felt, was the real problem. After all (and I speak to this
as one who has studied city planning from a security viewpoint) surveillance
really does work as a way to reduce crime. This does not necessarily mean that
city streets need a police presence. (In fact, a strong police presence can
actually make a street feel less safe.) But they do need “eyes on the street,”
that is to say a safe street is one that is constantly populated by people in
the neighborhood. A city that organizes itself to make sure that ordinary
people are going about their business at all times of the day and night on that
street makes a safe street. In this way I support surveillance to deter crime.
The odd thing about NSA surveillance is that it is secret. How is secret
surveillance a deterent to crime? It isn’t. What’s more, the way we punish
criminals is also generally a secret. We have Supermax prisons in the middle of
nowhere that incarcerate prisoners for very long periods of time in solitary
confinement. You have to dig down deep in order to find anything about these
places. That is not a deterent to crime either. Combine that with the erosion
of the 4th Amendment in the War on Drugs, idiotic minimum sentences
for low-level crimes, and three strikes laws. Now take what we just learned in
Ferguson, Missouri, where it was found that the local police force (looking
like the fucking army with assault rifles, riot gear, and tanks) was acting
like a tax collector and you start seeing the State less as an agent of law and
order and more of a co-conspirantant in a business model preying on people not
protecting them.
For the longest time Americans have been dangerously complicit and
complacent to these happeninings because the main victims are a marginalized
group of people, poor blacks. It is time to put an end to this for everybody.
The present civil rights violations are not confined to race. As Snowden points
out, anybody who gains power has the ability to use this against anyone.
Transparent surveillance is one thing. Perhaps it would be for the best if the
Internet were a public space with less anonymity. But secret surveillance is
another thing entirely. Combine that with a justice system weakened
consistently by forever wars, we have the largest threat to American freedom
today.
