Edward Snowden, the NSA, and Glenn Greenwald

I recently finished reading Glenn Greenwald’s book, “No Place to Hide”, and wanted to share some thoughts. Greenwald has been one of the most important voices to have entered the political discourse in many years. He was a constitutional lawyer for majority of his life. In 2005, while still a lawyer, started a political blog without high expectations in an attempt to make a broader impact than he could as a constitutional and civil-rights lawyer.

Over the past decade, the fear of terrorism has been greatly exaggerated and exploited by US leaders in order to justify extreme policies. These policies have led the NSA to create a mass surveillance program, one that has a “collect it all” approach on all the data. The revelations all started at in December 2012 when Greenwald received an email by someone calling himself Cincinnatus, referencing Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman farmer in the 5th century BC, who was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against an attack. After successfully defending the city, he relinquished his power back to the people and returned to his farming life. Cincinnatus has become a “model of civic virtue.”

The communications between Cincinnatus (Snowden) and Greenwald started off very slow. Greenwald thought it was a joke at first, and then later realized it was real when Laura Poitras had reached out to Greenwald confirming that this source is indeed worth pursuing. In order to begin communicating, Snowden had Greenwald install an encryption program to ensure their chats were not monitored. After getting a taste of what the documents contained, Greenwald and Poitras immediately flew to Hong Kong to meet with Snowden. From then the rest is history. Greenwald and others began reporting prolifically on the documents, and it reached critical mass very quickly.

One thing that struck me while reading this book was the brilliance of Snowden, and how well thought out he was in terms of his approach. Snowden had been working for the CIA, NSA, Booz Allen Hamilton, and other technology companies mainly doing security. He was an expert on the subject. He made it a point that the documents must be revealed over the course of a long period of time. He could have easily published all the documents on the internet in one fell swoop, but that would have been a single story and died out from public interest quickly. Instead, the explicitly told Greenwald and Poitras that they should report on these documents in a true journalistic way, analyzing and reporting on each document, one by one. This would allow for the discussion on the NSA to go on for years and hopefully change will occur as a result of it.

From reading this book, I could tell that Snowden was a very well thought, calm, composed individual. He is critically minded and methodical. The structure of the documents were extraordinarily well organized into countless folders, sub-folders, and sub-sub-folders. He had thought of his decision very carefully, and his conviction came from his moral standing. The difference between him and other people is his belief that your actions, not your ideals, is what dictates your moral compass. His first hand look into the activities of the NSA caused him to act.

The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs. If your not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real. — Edward Snowden.

Citizenship carries with it a duty to first police one’s own government before seeking to correct others. — Edward Snowden

Snowden’s only fear from outing himself as the source was that it would distract from the contents of the documents. He knew very well that an often used tactic of the media is to demonize the individual in order to ruin and distract the actual story. If a news outlet begins talking about how a person has mental problems, a bad history, sex scandals, etc, then the credibility of the source is then ruined, and people wont believe the revelations. The news outlets did indeed try to demonize Snowden; however, his many appearances showed he is incredibly well spoken and articulate in his motivations. He also feared people will become apathetic and forget about the issues; that is hardly the case now. The NSA revelations has been one of the most significant leaks in US history, and everyone is paying attention.

The main problem with the NSA is the invasion of privacy. No one argues that surveillance is not necessary. The alternative to mass surveillance is not the elimination of surveillance. The alternative is rather targeted surveillance on those whom there is substantial evidence against, and only done through the use of court orders. The real problem is the “collect it all”, mass surveillance approach that has been taken.

There are two types of data that is collected: metadata and content data. Metadata is the information on who, where, when, how, the content was sent. For example, metadata on email is information on the sender, the receiver, the time it was sent, the subject, the location of the receiver and sender, etc. This applies to phone calls, texts, etc. Content data is the actual content of the email or phone call or text message. What’s ironic is throughout this time, the US government has insisted that it is only collecting metadata, not content data, as if to say that it is not harmless. The opposite is true. Metadata tells more about you than content does, it predicts patterns, knows your entire network, and quickly tells information about you than listening to an entire conversation over the phone. “Consider the following hypothetical example: A young women calls her gynecologist, then calls her mother, then calls a man, whom she has repeatedly spoken to after 11pm over the past few months and he is not her husband, followed by a call to a center that offers abortions.” You can know much more about her life, much faster than listening to the content of each individual call.

So, what are the harms of of this mass surveillance? If people know they are being watched, they will radically change their behavior. Privary is essential to freedom and happiness. It is intuitively understood by most people. An easy example of this is the feeling of shame when you think you are alone, dancing, singing, confessing, sharing untested ideas, only to feel a shame when you realize someone was watching.

Only when we believe that nobody else is watching us do we feel free—safe— to truly experiment, to test boundaries, to explore new ways of thinking. What made the internet so appealing was precisely that it afforeded the ability to speak, search, and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration

Orwell talked about it in 1984 where citizens did not they if they were actually being monitored at that moment or not. They knew that at any time, the government could see what they were doing, and the government could look into their lives at any point in time. So the citizens could never know at any given point of they were being watched or not. The danger of of this type of mass surveillance is that it is far away, abstract. Because it is far away and conjectural, we are less exposed to it, making us less aware of its presence.

Mass surveillance also makes it difficult for organizing movements of dissent when the people who are organizing it are being watched and tracked. This surveillance also kills dissent at a deeper, more individual level. Say hypothetically, you became aware that your government was doing something wrong, and you wanted to research it. If your search patterns were being monitored by the government in question, it would know where you are in your analysis, what you are looking at, what you are reading, and essentially understand your thought patterns. How can you be critical of someone when they are standing right behind you watching you critically research them?

A misunderstanding of privacy is the notion that “if your not doing something wrong, you shouldn’t be afraid of hiding it”. Hiding something spans much further than the scope of wrong-doing. If someone is calling a suicide hotline, or an abortion provider, or a rehab clinic, or a whistle-blower is calling a reporter to inform him of illegal activity a government is doing. None of these people are doing anything wrong, but they have much to hide. In essence, every single person has something to hide. Privacy is relational.

What makes this dangerous is the agency’s ability to find private, non-dangerous, information about an individual, and exploit this information to destroy one’s reputation or discredit them.

Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy — which is their own population. — Noam Chomsky

Those that pose a challenge to a society and government are rarely targeted by the oppressive measures, and from their perspectives, they can easily convince themselves that these oppressive measures are harmless and doesn’t exist. “A true measure of a society’s freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.”

A big reason why the NSA has been able to achieve this level of power is the exaggerated threat of terrorism repeated over and over. John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor, wrote about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism, explain: “The number of people world wide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of the war zones. Its basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year.” Greenwald discusses this exaggeration and its effects to freedom by saying “A population, a country that venerates physical safety above all other values will ultimately give up its liberty and sanction any power seized by authority in exchange for the promise, no matter how illusory, of total security.”

The work of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and others is inspiring. The Obama administration has brought more prosecution to leakers than the combined total of all previous presidencies and has sought to create a climate of fear in order to hinder further attempts of whistle blowing. Snowden’s actions, and the mass support he has received, has created hope in the possibility of a more fair, just, and transparent government. For the average person, know that Snowden was also an average person, from an average background. His actions changed the world; and he has inspired average people to do what they believe in.

I highly recommend reading this book. It was hard to put it down and Glenn Greenwald is an incredible writer. You can find the book here and check out his new media outlet that he founded: The Intercept