You have read the stories, understand the severity. Some people idly sit by half expecting it, half accepting it and others lean more towards knee-jerk anger, what ever the approach, what now?

Not much it seems. Despite efforts to re-energise the public forum regarding state surveillance and scrutinising the powers in place, little has in fact changed in actual law and policy. In some places (read UK) there has been complete ‘media blackout’, of course this may be due to the governments own attempts to censor public knowledge(read GCHQ, Guardian Hard drives).

That being said there is also another paradigm which has hampered the debate from day one. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

It’s a compelling statement to say the least but it raises a multitude of questions, firstly that of the states own admission of mass surveillance. If they have nothing to fear, why were they hiding this for so long? It begs the question, what else don’t we know? In fact as of less than a month ago The Register reported on 3 secret bases, run by GCHQ, in the middle-east intercepting all kinds of eletronic information. On a more domestic scale British Telecoms (BT) and Vodafone have been identified as collaborators with the legislation in place to hand over data about all mobile communications of their customers.

But these are all long lists of seemingly overstepped interpretations of legislation and documentation of revelations and democratic secrecy. It’s hardly surprising anymore, let alone disheartening, it feels more like a betrayment than anything.

In an attempt to rekindle this two sided love affair between state and privacy the Obama administration announced an end to all unwarrentless domestic phone tapping (although not yet implemented) and also rulings of the High Court concluded that “back-door” access that has been exploited by the NSA in the previous years is indeed “unconstitutional”.

That being said, it doesn’t address the issue of where are we now? Are Americans seeing improvements in privacy? Equally as importantly is the rest of the world? The rest of the world has no constitution, nor the same legislation in place to protect our privacy from unwarranted scrutiny.

Former GCHQ Director, David Ormand famously stated “We (GCHQ) have the brains, they (NSA) have the money”. It is this global interpretation of what privacy actually means in a digital realm that is stopping us from making any real significant progress in continuing our own digital democratisation of our own data and more importantly, implementing changes that can be made to make sure it never happens again.

While the state values privacy as a currency, we at citizens see it as a contextual background for all communication and while there is no real answer to the solution of our problems, it certainly highlights the key failures in legislation, law and interpretation of that law that has been the Internets true downfall, fear of unrest.

Above all else, discuss, share ideas, find solutions and collaborate. It’s the only way to make our now in-depth understanding of the systems that govern us to be used for improving our own democracy.

End Notes:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/ — Glenn Greenwalds’ current digital home of NSA revelations

https://www.openrightsgroup.org- Open rights group (UK) for the ending of mass surveillance.

http://www.restorethe4th.com — Restore the 4th.

There are many other groups and organisations out there lobbying for reform, explore.