When I was a kid, I remember a guy named Daniel Ellsberg
leaking some classified documents to the New York Times about the Vietnam War
called "the Pentagon Papers."
When the whistle-blower finally stood trial for espionage,
my parents weren't quite sure how to feel. But when Richard Nixon's crew was
revealed to have been conducting illegal wiretaps in an effort to discredit the
former intelligence contractor, well, they were outraged and decided Ellsberg
was a hero. So did the judge and most of America.
I wonder whether Ed Snowden, the 29-year-old Booz Allen
Hamilton employee behind last week's series of leaks about National Security
Agency surveillance on the American public, will be rewarded with the same
admiration. You'd think we would be even more outraged by what he uncovered
than we were by the surveillance of Ellsberg. After all, it's not just one lone
loose cannon being wiretapped here, it's all of us being monitored.
Snowden has not uncovered a human conspiracy here but the
workings of the machine itself. And it's a machine that really does require
some human intervention.
In the coming months, I expect a campaign to be waged
against this young man that will make the one against Ellsberg look like
child's play.
His enemies have the full force of the machine -- every e-mail
he's written and every phone call he's made -- to use against him. This won't
be pretty.
But before we decide that Snowden was smiling too much in his
videotaped interview with The Guardian, earned too much money or somehow
betrayed his lovely girlfriend in Hawaii in a personal vendetta against his
former bosses at the intelligence agencies, let's take just a moment to
consider his particularly human act of heroism.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of government employees
and contractors who have long been aware of the NSA's total surveillance
effort.
What next for Snowden?
Pentagon Papers
Whistleblower on NSA Legal risks for NSA whistleblower
As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one
former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced
through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data
algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.
I always begged them to write about it or to let me do so while protecting
their identities. They refused to come forward and believed my efforts to
shield them would be futile. "I don't want to lose my security clearance.
Or my freedom," one told me.
Snowden was willing to take those risks and, I daresay,
more.
Yet it wasn't just fear keeping people from talking about
the growing cybersurveillance state but a sense of inevitability. This is just
how technology evolves, at least when it's uncontested. Everyone knows, or
should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell
phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is
recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook
are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data.
In such an environment, it's hard to come down too hard on
government intelligence officers who want to get in on this action.
Our leaders are suffering from what I call "present
shock": the overwhelming assault of multiple threats from everywhere at
the same time, amplified by technology of all sorts. Terrorists have
unprecedented access to weapons of mass destruction and work through
decentralized networks around the clock. As data-gathering tools emerge with ever-increasing
ability to keep tabs on the world's communications, how can an overburdened
intelligence agency choose otherwise than to exploit their potential?
The rush to employ technology has become automatic.
Called a defector, leaker defends his decision
We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded
biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there's an
incoming message and check our e-mail even when we'd best pay attention to
what's going on around us in the real world. We text while driving. Likewise,
without conscious restraint, government agencies can't help but let the growing
power of big data draw them into ever more invasive forms of surveillance on a
population whose members simply must include those who intend harm on the rest.
This is just how everything runs when it's left on "default"
settings.
Yet if we let the evolution of our machines dictate the
evolution of our policy, the only possible result is what Snowden calls
"turnkey tyranny."
As I have argued in other contexts, the best weapon against
the paralysis of technologically induced present shock is human intervention.
Just as we the people stood against the structural tyranny of an overreaching
monarchy, it is we the people who must stand against the structural tyranny of
runaway technology.
Snowden is a hero because he realized that our very humanity
was being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of
making us safe. Unlike those around him, who were too absorbed in their task to
reflect on their actions and pause in their pursuit of digital omniscience,
Snowden allowed himself to be "disturbed" by what he was doing.
More in the midst of technology than most of us will ever
be, Snowden disengaged for long enough to be human and to consider the impact
of what he was helping build. He pressed pause.
Thank heavens our intelligence agencies are staffed by
people like Snowden, not robots. People can still think.
That's why they call it intelligence.
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