‘Snowden is a patriot who wants to come home’
According to Oliver Stone, the director of the film Snowden, companies profit enormously from data mining of our personal searches, behaviour and habits. And there is more money in selling that data than in selling a product. It’s surveillance capitalism.
liver Stone, the famed director of movies such as JFK and Wall Street, talks about his new film, Snowden, about Edward Snowden the man, the totalitarian character of “surveillance capitalism” and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
GLOBAL VIEWPOINT: You portray Edward Snowden in your film not as a traitor, but as an information age patriot defending American citizens from their own intelligence agencies. At one point in the film, Snowden and his colleagues are shocked to learn that the incidence of surveillance on Americans was greater than on America’s adversaries, the Chinese and Russians. Since the Snowden revelations, security laws have been revamped. Do you see these as sufficient safeguards on civil liberties, or weak rules easily rolled back if there is another major terror attack — or if [Republican presidential nominee] Donald Trump wins the presidency? OLIVER STONE: As Snowden has said, “They’ve only changed the drapes in the White House”. The capacity, of course, is still there. There have been some curbs. But there are several federal judiciary challenges that have gone back and forth, some rulings calling mass eavesdropping unconstitutional, which I firmly believe, while others have moved in the other direction. So, it is all now in a kind of bureaucratic muddle with a lot of confusion about where the boundaries lie. It will take years to clear up. This whole episode from the aftermath of 9/11 through the Snowden revelations — and beyond — is a story for history, which is why I made the film.
James Risen of the New York Times had the scoop on mass eavesdropping as far back as 2004, but they decided not to publish at the time because they were called in by [former president George W.] Bush and his gang and warned off for “national security” reasons. Had this massive surveillance been known at the time, it could well have shifted the election to John Kerry, who was then running against Bush, who was seeking a second term. It was not the Pentagon Papers time anymore for the New York Times, but the opposite.
The Times finally released the story in late 2005. It was the first sign of what some of us suspected: Something deeply wrong was going on inside the Bush administration along with interrogation policies like waterboarding. But it wasn’t until June 2013, five years into the “reformminded” administration of US President Barack Obama, when Snowden broke open the dam of secrecy with his revelations of programmes such as Upstream and Prism [which accessed personal data from the databases of Google, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft].
Now, we’ve gone even further to cyberwar, which Obama unleashed onto the world from the early days of his administration when he sped up the Stuxnet virus attacks — begun in the Bush period — which wormed its way into and damaged Iran’s nuclear centrifuge controls. For the first time, the US was using a digital weapon offensively, not defensively. One of Snowden’s biggest concerns is that the intelligence community has not so much been defending America as building up offensive capabilities.
My larger point is that, for all of Snowden’s revelations, they haven’t exposed everything. They are only an implication of what still lies underneath.
Having seen the US using Stuxnet and other digital weapons offensively, don’t you think they have woken up in Iran, China and Russia and built their own capacities? It is now a digital arms race. And that doesn’t even include the non-state hackers.
A few weeks ago a group called “Shadow Brokers” gave a warning to the intelligence elites. They claimed to have hacked the National Security Agency and stolen cyberweapons, which they say they will auction off to the highest bidder. In effect, they are saying, “We know what weapons you have, and we are going to go against you unless you give up this form of warfare.” The US has been the biggest offender in cyberwar. And now we are getting it back.
And if Trump wins? Personally, I don’t think he has a chance. [Democratic nominee] Hillary [Clinton] will win. And then we are in for a very rocky road because she has a vociferous and belligerent foreign policy. She was a terrible secretary of state, probably worse than Condi Rice. She’s very hawkish and aggressive.
The paradox of the internet age is that ever greater connectivity also means ever greater capacity for surveillance — and not only by the government, but by private digital companies that collect and exploit personal data for commercial reasons. Does that worry you as well? Absolutely. I said recently that the Pokemon Go game, which enables access to a user’s Google account personal data, is an entirely new level of invasion. Companies like Google profit enormously from data mining of your personal searches, behaviour and habits. There is more money in selling that data than in selling a product. It’s surveillance capitalism. It really William Oliver Stone, born on September 15, 1946, is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.
Stone won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay as writer of (1978). He also wrote the acclaimed gangster movie
(1983). As a director, Stone achieved prominence as director/ writer of the war drama (1986), for which Stone won the Academy Award for Best Director; the film was awarded Best Picture.
Stone attended Trinity School in New York City before his parents sent him away to The Hill School, a college-preparatory school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His parents were divorced abruptly while he was away at school (1962) and this, because he was an only child, marked him deeply. Stone’s mother was often absent and his father made a big impact on his life; father-son relationships were to feature heavily in Stone’s films. is a new kind of totalitarianism. With respect to government surveillance, it has been the private companies who are now installing encryption software so the government can’t get in through a back door. They are afraid of losing their customers. They’ve jumped from being collaborators to the other side of the fence: “Now we are going to give you privacy.”
I hope so. Are all of these encryption programmes real? Can you trust them? You don’t know. We’re all wandering in this atmosphere of uncertainty. We watch our words. It’s a chilling effect. McCarthyism 2.0.
At one point in the movie when Snowden warns his girlfriend to watch what she says online, she shrugs and says, “I’ve got nothing to hide.” Is the so-called Facebook generation naive, already acculturated to this new era of surveillance? I don’t think you can generalise about a whole generation. But to the extent it is true I do think there is a certain passivity, a sense of “what can you do anyway?” It is not like there is an alternate system of communication. Your only choice is to go off the grid, which some do. That is why Snowden and others are really fighting for some effective regulation and internet reform.
The New York Times recently did a huge profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, suggesting that, wittingly or not, he is benefiting the Russians. While Assange has so far refused to criticise Russia’s crackdown on the freedom of speech, Snowden has, calling a proposed Russian law an act of “big brother.” What distinction to you make between Assange and Snowden? Ed Snowden has played it very straight. He loves his country, the US, and wants to go back home. He is a patriot who just wants to fix what is wrong and get on with it. I don’t know if he realises that he couldn’t have got asylum anywhere else but Russia, which is beyond the reach of the American intelligence agencies. No Seal raid is going to work there to snatch him. China, Russia or Iran are the only places the US would not have been able to force the governments to hand him over, or go in with a commando raid. Julian [Assange] has a very different view of the world and is in a very different situation. He sees the world as dominated by the menacing American empire, and he wants to fight it and bring it down. That is not Snowden at all.
You spent a lot of time in Russia making the Snowden film, including a long session with Putin. What was your impression? Very clear-eyed. Rational. Unemotional. He is a fervent patriot who believes in a strong Russia, he’s a “Son of Russia”, as the saying there goes. He gave Russia its integrity back after it fell apart in the post-Soviet days of Boris Yeltsin. Like the leaders in China, he sees the US as seeking to ignite a “colour revolution”-style popular uprising, like in the Ukraine, to expand its sphere of influence and keep Russia weak. We’re poking the bear. But the bear is tough. Nathan Gardels is a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute and is editor-in-chief of the WorldPost.