Washington
Security vs Freedom
EDWARD SNOWDEN
PART ONE
Reforming things within the system is the ideal. Is the way it should work. It’s the way our society was designed to function. But what happens when you have failures across institutions? This is what produces whistle blowers. Whistle blowers are the safe guard of last resort.
When we have a comprehensive failure across all branches of government. We’ve got these cyber points. We’ve got these individuals who have seen these problems in technology. And enevitably this is gong to leave us. Because we leave off the abuses. And we have this natural inclination to think they are extraordinary. To think they are departures from the natural order of things.
We can address these issues in the narrow sense and everything will be better. We can rely a lot more on the system. But it turns out abuse is the by product of power. And whenever we begin aggregate power groups – whenever we have these increasingly small groups with greater and greater periods of power – we need to this power. That is the circumstance where we have to search for new mechanisms.
That mechanism today is technology. The technology that we are relying on are things like encryption. Like encrypted communications that enforce our rights through the systems we rely on everyday. The things that are underlying the background. This is representing a threat that governments don’t really want to deal with.
This is not about liberals . This is not about authoritarian states. It is about the nature of government, The nature of society. About the nature of our civil organization.
There is an intersection between technology and access to information in society. We refer to this as the communications fabric that we all rely on today. The internet is the shorthand for it – but it existed before that. It’s simply all our telephony and all these other capabilities are in a global mesh. That increasingly impact the lives of all of us. But over which we have less and less influence over time.
The application of new technologies are science such as encryption. Such as mathematics. Secure communications allow us to enforce these rights across borders. Whether you’re a liberal state. Whether you’re an authoritarian state. Whether you’re trying to make sure someone is trying to communicate between a journalist and source in the United States, Russia or China or somewhere else.
This is what we have to do. We have to accept that the only way to protect the rights of one is to protect the rights of all.
At the same time that we see corporations gaining more and more access to our lives, our private records. But increasingly this represents a threat to governments because they see that as a domain of activity that they will no longer be able to intervene. No longer be able to regulate.
The President of the United States just yesterday spoke at South By Southwest on the Apple vs. FBI controversy.
And he again contextualized in the false choice between Privacy and Security. But the reality is we can have both. But we can only have both if we have one or the other. If we don’t have Privacy then we can’t have Security. We don’t have an open society. We don’t have a free society.
We don’t have the liberal tradition we ourselves inherited. Rather than watching people because you have some suspicion that they have done something wrong : We’re watching everybody all the time because they could do abuse their liberty. But not because they could abuse their liberty. Not because they have.
Now why does this matter? Why do we care about the meta data? Why do we care about the sort of pre-criminal surveillance regime that is now occurring?
I would argue that Thomas Drake speaking yesterday had the most succinct and important case study for this which is Jeffery Sterling.