Let’s make this clear: we need less tin foil hats and more transparency
There is mounting evidence that the governments of some countries have been creating a surveillance system to spy on their own populations, justifying their activities by blaming, for example, the terrorist threat, intellectual property rights, or child pornography.
The steady development of technology plays a double role in all this: on the one hand it has increased the ability of governments to control telecommunications and the media, making them easier to trace and audit within a system that now has most of us logged somewhere or other. At the same time, it has boosted the development of a parallel communication system that is impossible to control, facilitating the appearance of data protection systems such as cyphering and encryption.
Strategies to counter this abuse by our governments fall under two categories: defense and attack. There are many defense tactics, but none offer full protection. We should not forget that it is not just the internet that is being monitored, but where it is possible to protect oneself; surveillance extends into other areas, from our telephone conversations, to car trips, or even going for a walk. Education in the use of encoding and cyphering is necessary in this first phase that has revealed the level of abuse, but thinking in terms of defensive strategies in this regard is to go against technological progress, and is what I call “the strategy of the tin foil hat”: ineffective and ridiculous. We cannot live in society where we are all obliged to protect ourselves at all times from the conspiracies hatched by our governments.
But going on the attack is a very different strategy. This consists of recovering a concept that should be the inviolable core of all systems of government: transparency. As a society it is increasingly important that everybody understand that transparency is a fundamental value, and one that should govern absolutely all transactions in our private lives, as well as the activities of our governments; anything kept from us should be filed under “official secrets”, and subject to exhaustive controls on the use of the category and term. As a society, we cannot accept that the work of our government consists of surrounding itself with bloated secret services and concentric circles of discreet diplomats. Nothing, not national security, nor the government’s work can justify that. We have reached the absurd point whereby governments have multiplied by an insane degree the amount of money they spent on security and spying during the worst years of the cold war, and at a time when this is not remotely necessary; what is really going on is that we are being spied on by our own governments, and at our own expense.
As voters living in democracies, we must throw out any notion that this is in any way “normal”, that “things have always been like this”, or that these are “matters for our governments to decide on”. This is not the case, nor should it ever be. Calling somebody naïve because they are angry at being spied on is not only much more naïve, but collaboration. We need to reclaim the absolute transparency of all political activity: we want to know everything, to see things from every angle, and to know what our politicians are doing at all hours, who they meet with, who they talk to, what deals they cut, why they make the proposals they make, and which interests they are defending.
When unpopular decisions need to be made, then our politicians must make their case clearly and openly, with all the information on the table, and explain to us why these decisions are necessary. In short, there are no unpopular decisions; only badly explained decisions. Transparency itself should be enough to eliminate the disgusting corruption that has become institutionalized in so many countries, to the extent that it now seems a normal part of things.
This means that as voters we must demand that electoral programs include transparency levels that no generation of politicians has ever experienced, and to punish those who do not comply. The surveillance systems used against us will disappear when people themselves, thanks to transparency, can see the objectives of these systems and how they are managed.
We need transparency everywhere: transparency laws that go way beyond anything our political representatives could imagine: exaggerated, excessive, impossible, unthinkable. The more politicians think and say they are impossible, the better. We need a new generation of politicians with transparency built in to the DNA, and who will demand that everything be subjected to scrutiny, and that public office is, well, public. Politics has become a parody of itself, and transparency is the only means by which to reinvent it. So let’s have less tin foil hats and more TRANSPARENCY, please.
