An unblinking eye on Netizens
WHAT HAPPENs when Big Brother’s search for information tramples our privacy, and a sense of quietude and reflection?
Psst, wanna know a secret? Privacy is dead. Surprise! And you’re powerless to do anything about it — like in a science-fiction blockbuster. Were you shocked — really shocked — that the U.S. National Security Agency was eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens? But wait. Up in the sky, look: It’s a scud missile. It’s a drone. It’s Super Hackers to the rescue. Cyber warfare is here — hey, this is as exciting as a video game!
The terms Orwellian and Kafkaesque have regained currency. Big Brother, your pal and defender, is watching. Trust us: We’re fighting the War on Terror. Fearless leader Barack Obama said so: “This war, like all wars, must end. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.” Yes, indeed. POTUS 44 continued: “Expanded surveillance raises difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy.” (Call for Alex Trebeck!)
Saying that the events of 9/11 changed everything, in terms of freedom of speech over the Internet and, especially, privacy (which Louis Brandeis defined as “the right to be let alone”) elicits a big public “duh.”
“Information must be free” has been the buzz phrase for Netizens since its inception almost 30 years ago. But what happens when the search for information tramples privacy, and a sense of quietude and reflection? Is freedom just another word for nothing left to lose?
The Internet, pianist and writer Vijay Iyer said, “enables us to forget more quickly without ever feeling the need to make sense of an experience — there’s always something else to consume. I think it’s become this systematized way of constantly forgetting, because all the memory is externalized. For me, it’s kind of terrifying, not because I’m overly attached to my memories, but because without memories who are you?”
After the World Trade Centre was attacked in a crazed act unequalled in the Age of Media, the U.S. government passed the USA Patriot Act, allowing the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.
In Rule of Law, Misrule of Men, Harvard professor Elaine Scarry wrote: “Our inner lives become transparent, and the workings of the government become opaque.” (Call 911! No, wait, don’t!)
“What we are witnessing now is the emergence of a new social contract,” privacy scholar Simon Chesterman claims in One Nation, Under Surveillance, “in which individuals give the state (and, frequently, many other actors) power over information in exchange for security and the conveniences of living in the modern world.”
People have accepted the new paradigm without question, Garret Keizer wrote in the provocative little book Privacy: “It is not the Constitution that is being subverted by Big Brother so much as the will to resist, without which there never could have been a Constitution in the first place.” Cue Rod Serling: We find ourselves in ... The Twilight Zone!
Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist whose view from the inside of technology is reflected in his latest books You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future, framed the problem in metadata and social engineering.
“Metadata broke its original promise of finding a needle in a haystack,” Lanier wrote recently in The Nation, “but instead offered a more lucrative gift than anyone knew to hope for. Moving haystacks turns out to be more valuable than finding needles …
“A government could engage in undetectable targeted repression using metadata. Something like PRISM might be hooked up to a secret defence mechanism in which certain people are subject to a couple of extra steps when they apply for a loan, for instance. ... Metadata systems can turn the kind of broad, almost subconscious mechanisms that have persistently held back African-Americans and Native Americans into a science. ... The rise of big computers is a primary engine of the rise of the 1 per cent.
“Metadata schemes always turn out to be more social engineering than artificial intelligence,” Lanier wrote. “Young people, weaned on free Internet services that spy on them, seem to have accepted an America in which their financial prospects are reduced, and in which no one should expect ‘privacy.’ The acquiescence of our young people is historically exceptional and bizarre. …”
Monkey see, monkey do. The peer pressure to be hooked up has been a driving force of adolescence since corporations started catering to the “youth market” with the first baby boom generation. The Internet, Twitter, Facebook and the like are their field of dreams.
In other words, Brave New World will be read, not as a cautionary tale, but as an instruction manual.
Senator Joe Lieberman introduced the Cybersecurity and Freedom Act of 2011, allowing the government to shut down the Internet in a case of war or emergency. “Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too.” As the U.S. is permanently “at war with terrorism” his proposal doesn’t seem that far-fetched. What is privacy in a hyper-mediated world in which people willingly become exhibitionists of varying degrees? Keizer defined it as “a creaturely resistance to being used against one’s will.”
A consideration of privacy, he wrote, “leads us to a consideration of who we are as human beings and what we have a right to demand for ourselves, and what we have an obligation to extend to others.”
His definition “takes a poke at the flabby morality of insisting that ‘anything you do is OK so long as it doesn’t hurt somebody else’ (with the hurt almost never defined by the somebody else). According to that morality, I am doing nothing wrong if I make a clandestine movie of my neighbours having sex, so long as they never find out about it and so long as I reserve the film exclusively for my own enjoyment. According to my definition, I have indeed done something wrong: I have violated my neighbours’ privacy. I have used them.”
To be used is also, he said, “to be cheated out of one’s ability to serve, as slaves are cheated out of it, along with all but a few shreds of their privacy. For example, I cannot serve you with a compliment if you’ve already spied it in my diary.” Wilful violations of other people’s privacy often come, in Keizer’s opinion, as “viewing those people not as individuals equal to oneself and like oneself, but rather as objects or conveniences or things to be used, either for one’s entertainment or one’s amusement, or to gain information. ... The violation of privacy and the exploitation of other people are united or function together.” Enter Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, and “fugitive from justice.”
“The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” he wrote, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. ... It’s more efficient to take and store everything than it is to work out who you want to intercept.”
The “commercialization of mass surveillance,” because of the huge increase in the volume and types of communication, is “totalizing now, because people put all their political ideas, their family communications, and their friendships on to the Internet.
“There is a battle between the power of this information collected by insiders, these shadow states of information. ... versus the increased size of the commons with the Internet as a common tool for humanity to speak to itself.”
The Guardian, the London daily that’s become a secret-leaker’s heaven, asked Assange why, if it’s so outrageous for the state to read our emails, is it OK for WikiLeaks to publish confidential state correspondence.
“It’s all about power,” he replied. “And accountability. The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn’t reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.”
What a difference notoriety makes: Assange has gone from whistleblower to “cyber-terrorist.”
Fox political pundit Bob Beckel railed: “A dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. ... And I’m not for the death penalty, so ... there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”
To make that eventuality more palatable, there’s character assassination. New York Times editor Bill Keller quoted his reporter Eric Schmitt’s (private) letter to him, taking his first measure of Assange: “He’s tall — probably 6-foot-2 or 6-3 — and lanky, with pale skin, grey eyes and a shock of white hair that seizes your attention. He was alert but dishevelled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, lightcoloured sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”
U.S. army private Bradley Manning, who leaked to Assange, is said to be confused over his sexuality, a gay man wishing he wasn’t just five-feet tall. Edward Snowden is depicted as obsessed and naïve, a paranoid self-aggrandizer. How’s this for a no-holds-barred (philosophical) declaration? “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant. ... When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is OK. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.”
Snowden, a computer expert without a high school diploma, gave up a girlfriend, a paradise home in Hawaii and a $200,000-a-year job as an analyst for the National Security Agency. “I know the government will demonize me,” he told the Guardian. When he wound up in Hong Kong, after leaking NSA material, he lined his hotel door with pillows to prevent eavesdropping, and wore a large red hood over his head and laptop to foil hidden cameras that might catch his passwords.
Then there’s the cat-and-mouse spectacle of Snowden hiding out in a Moscow airport, awaiting some country (Russia?) to accept his request for political asylum, while reporters scoured the joint for clues to his whereabouts. Rebecca MacKinnon, in Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, wrote that U.S. law “is vague and out-of-date” regarding digital communications stored “in the cloud,” from Gmail and Hotmail to Amazon Web-hosting to Blogspot, Facebook and Twitter. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which hasn’t been updated since 1986, allows enforcement authorities to request all data without the need for a warrant if they were stored for more than 180 days.
Obama, a former constitutional lawyer who ran for election promising to rectify Bush-era surveillance abuses, has gone to unprecedented lengths to expand access to such data.
It’s the technology, stupid. Folks love their gadgets and gizmos more than their freedom from being spied upon. And those terrorists, hiding out in Afghan mountain caves or apartments in Pakistan, are just like us, equipped with laptops, the great equalizer. As the young Boston terrorist suspects knew, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to build a lethal roadside bomb: just Google it.
Now there’s the sinister spectre of cyber-warfare: systems that control — uh, guide — our lives can be hacked by adversaries ... or just for the hell of it. Hunker down. We’re all inhabitants of the cyber-netherworld. What to do? We’re all just bozos on this bus.