Big Brother Watching, but Does Anyone Care?

Edward Snowden is the man who leaked the extent to which the US government was spying on its own citizens. He’s in his 30’s now, but that still makes him old enough to have experienced the way we used to connect to the Internet before the always-connected age we live in now:

“I’d wake the computer up and go online, holding my pillows against the machine to stifle the dial tone of the modem and the ever-intensifying hiss of its connection.”

His book, Permanent Record, is very, very interesting.

So why did he leak the extent of US government surveillance? Obviously it was ideological, and the journey to that set of values makes for interesting reading:

“(At twenty), like most young people, I had solid convictions that I refused to accept weren’t truly mine but rather a contradictory cluster of inherited principles… Much of what I believed, or of what I thought I believed, was just youthful imprinting.”

Around that time, 9/11 happened. And the US government totally changed its attitude towards surveillance, including at home. Snowden, a contractor at the NSA (US security agency), was once called on to give a talk on Chinese surveillance of its own citizens, as a last-minute replacement speaker. The prep work he did for that talk would change him. He was horrified at the extent of how far the Chinese had already gone… but then he realized:

“There was simply no way for America to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same itself, and I had a sneaking feeling that while I was looking through all this China material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America.”

Or as he puts it in another part of the book:

“If something can be done, it probably will be done, and probably already has been… The invention driving a technology rarely, if ever, limits its application and use.”

The US government in the 9/11 paranoia got laws passed that allowed them to collect data on all electronic communications, even domestically. Years later, as the hysteria diluted, lawmakers wondered if this was just warrantless wiretapping?! The government indulged in word play: it argued that the government could collect and hold any data it wanted. It only needed a warrant if it “searched for and retrieved” them from its database.

The argument got even more dangerous with the advent of the smartphone. Data about data (aka metadata) could be very revealing: Where did you go? At what time? How long did you stay there? Who was near you? All such things could be known without ever looking at the data itself! (This is the kind of info your phone has about you, and while people scream murder against Facebook and Google on this count, the US public continues to have don’t-care attitude when the US government has been indulging in the same).

I guess most people don’t understand what “metadata” means. And so they don’t care. And that made Snowden introspect:

“I wondered what the point was of my getting so worked up over government surveillance if my friends, neighbors and fellow citizens were more than happy to invite corporate surveillance into their homes.”

Think Alexa, smart-fridges and the good old smartphone.

But when Snowden did decide to go public, he had many things to consider. Was the info too technical? Would it just go over most people’s heads? And if he went to a media outlet, would the government just arm-twist them into not publishing? Worse, the media only focuses on breaking news and scoops, and most journalists didn’t understand technology anyway… Ergo:

“I had to do more than just hand some journalists some documents – more, even, than help interpret the documents.”

But even if he did that, it would be a slow process. What if he was arrested midway? So he felt he had to leave the US. But where could he go? Europe always caved into the US. The US did whatever it liked in Latin American and Africa. If he went to China or Russia, all the US would need to discredit him would be to point at which country he was located in.

“The process of elimination left me with Hong Kong.”

Hong Kong was China without being China. China would never extradite anyone to the US. And the US wouldn’t dare kidnap someone from Chinese territory.

After the exposé, and being on the run after his disclosures, Snowden still worries if things will really change in the US. After all, isn’t it true that most Internet users in the US were born around/after 9/11 and have “lived their entire lives under the omnipresent specter of this surveillance”, so it is just normal for them?

The story hasn’t ended, but the signs aren’t positive: most of us associate surveillance with corporations, not governments. And those corporations give us plenty of benefits for free based on that surveillance, so the perception we have is generally neutral and we let it go with a shrug…