Daily Times

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” — Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and scientist, writer and politician.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden used the above quote to describe, and perhaps justify his decision to leak thousands of classified documents to the public. To further his justifications of why he did what he did, Snowden has blamed President Barack Obama’s failure to live up to campaign promises, singling out the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (which the President had promised to close when he took office in 2009). Whatever his intentions may have been and whether he is regarded a traitor or hero, he has certainly shed light on issues of civil liberties and violations of privacy.

The US intelligence industry, as it can be fairly called, is now composed of a nearly half a dozen agencies and services, many of them repetitive and many (such as the NSA where Snowden was employed) whose purpose is far from being clear. The National Security Act of 1947 when the Cold War was at its peak saw the rise of massive data collection and analysis. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the world has been seeing a fresh resurgence of data collection, particularly since 9/11, with the declaration of ‘a global war on terrorism’ in the name of which the government sees fit to violate all domains of privacy of its citizens. The players have changed since the Cold War. It is not any longer us versus the Communists. It is literally us versus us or rather the government versus its citizens, ordinary folks like you and me for the most part.

The dangers of having such an intensely technologically empowered government that is capable of collecting such a wide array of data are many. No doubt many of us ponder the real motivations of the Edward Snowdens and the Julian Assanges but what is essential to remember and ask is: is the State and its surveillance, the intelligence gathering industry, ‘Big Brother’, out of our control? Have even elected officials lost control of this far overreaching monster that violates the rights of American citizens protected by the US Constitution? Benjamin Franklin stated, “The US Constitution doesn’t guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.” It is not difficult to understand that a government that violates the freedoms and civil rights of its own people (or those of other nations, keeping Guantanamo Bay in mind) is neither providing happiness nor allowing the pursuit of it.

The Julian Assanges and Edward Snowdens remind us that they, in fact, are in many ways, protecting our rights for they are very easy to forget or overlook when we were not even aware to what extent our privacy was being violated.

In replacing the Cold War with terrorism, the government has created an intensely intricate group of organisations that today clearly seem to have lost any dignified purpose or meaning. Anything is game and everyone is on the radar. If George Orwell only knew to what extent Big Brother is watching and listening and reading!

It seems clear now that this intelligence machinery must be downsized and reorganised with the help of the White House and Congress. A strict set of rules for conduct and operations must be established within the realms of dignity and morality.

We would be wrong to think that Snowden is the last whistleblower the world will see. Future Snowdens will continue to draw great attention. The government’s infantile responses that these are all a web of lies, that it has thwarted at least 50 terrorist attacks ‘thanks to’ its surveillance programmes, that Snowden has engaged in espionage against the United States, all the offences in the line of its defence, raises another significant issue. The espionage monster, which the government itself has created, has its flaws and all the technology in the world cannot take away the human factor: the one that bases its judgments and decisions, as life-threatening as they may be, on moral grounds. There came a point when people such as Assange and Snowden realised that enough is enough and no doubt there will be more like them in the future.

The larger question remains: how to stop the growth of the intelligence industry? To what extent will it go? This is a difficult question to answer and whether there will actually be any alterations in this domain are uncertain and unlikely. Having said that, the US government and in fact any other for that matter, should not be surprised or shocked when whistleblowers catch them at their own game.

So, whether Snowden is considered a hero or a traitor, the Pandora’s Box has been opened and there is no turning back now. We need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: since when did the United States become a country people seek asylum from?

The writer is an English and French professor and columnist residing in the USA and France. She can be reached at scballand@gmail.com