The post-Snowden era, year one
Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the post-Snowden era: one year exactly since we first learned of the vast network of spying that a bloated National Security Agency had set up in violation of Constitutional guarantees, the logic of international relations, and the fundamental rights of people around the world.
One year ago, the world realized that what until then we had only suspected was in fact true: governments supposedly elected by us were spending their time spying on us, using the false excuse that it was for our own protection. They were listening to our telephone conversations, reading our emails, looking at the websites we visited, as well as our search history, and all this without any evidence that we had done anything wrong or represented a danger to our societies. This is a system that has no problem spying on the heads of friendly states either, or vacuuming up information about what entire countries were saying, while violating the data banks of private companies. In short, George Orwell’s vision of the future, and one that can be described in a single word: INSANE.
One year ago, we discovered that we were living in a huge lie, and began to take steps to destroy that system. Thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden, a wide-ranging public debate has begun about the type of political system we live under: it may seem insane to us now, but there were people who argued that it was better to live like this, people who really believed along the lines of “I haven’t done anything, so therefore I have nothing to fear.” There were people who really believed our government’s propaganda about having dismantled at least 50 alleged terrorist attacks thanks to their mass spying networks; people who believed that collecting metadata from our telephone conversations was not a serious matter, and that giving up our right to privacy meant nothing as long as it prevented terrorist attacks; or that there was no problem because the government had it all under control. Well, none of this was true. The debate is, to all intents and purposes, over: mass spying serves no purpose, it does not prevent terrorist attacks, and is simply a way of exercising social control that no society in its right collective mind would tolerate.
One year on, Edward Snowden, who has had to sacrifice his life, his career, his home, and even his citizenship, has been proved to be a whistleblower who still needs protecting, and has more than shown that his intention was to prevent the abuses he saw being carried out and that defined a society that nobody in their right mind would want to live in, making himself in the process the most deserving, and globally supported candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has become the person who has most impacted on the debate about what society should do with technology, and about the model of society and government that we deserve: what is reasonable and what constitutes abuse, what guarantees we demand, and from who, and the controls that should be imposed on all governments. We are talking about a process of collective reflection, and one that is essential, and that cannot be left to governments to decide, because as has been clearly shown from our collective inaction, power cannot be trusted.
Edward Snowden has released a video and a letter to commemorate this anniversary. What has begun is a movement that is only just beginning, and that will eventually protect us from abuse of power, and help us to design systems to prevent this happening in the future, to influence public opinion, and eventually to dismantle an insane system that should never have been allowed to function. One year on, we should take inspiration from the last line of Snowden’s letter:
“We’ve come a long way, but there’s more to be done.”
(En español, aquí)
