Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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...

With all the noise and outrage over the US government’s tapping into all the major Internet companies to gather data, it was interesting to see the reaction in Germany . Yup, in Germany, not the US. And this was before they discovered that the US had spied on EU consulates! Wolfgang Schmidt, a former lieutenant colonel in the erstwhile Stasi, spoke wistfully about the kind of surveillance the Americans got caught doing: “You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true…So much information, on so many people.” Now you might think, sure, the Internet allows for so much more data to be collected, no wonder the Stasi would have loved it. But you would only be partially correct. Because even the technology to surveil (is that even a word? But you get the meaning, right?) back then was primitive. How primitive? Well, the equipment only allowed Schmidt’s department to tap 40 phone lines at a time. If he wanted a new guy tapped, he would have to drop an existing guy! That’...