Saturday, June 27, 2015
On CitizenFour and Ed Snowden
I watched
today CitizenFour, an Oscar winning documentary on the doings of Edward Snowden,
in a cosy little theater on the 10th floor of the Films Society building in
Peddar Road, Mumbai. The documentary is very real- it stars Edward Snowden
as himself, Julian Assange as himself (in a blink-and-you-miss it appearance,
mind you), with live interviewing of Snowden by the Director Glen Greenwald.
It’s a bit tingling in that it’s very live- you are seeing Snowden at a time
when the entire world, including the FBI and CIA, were trying to find him.
Citizen Four is Snowden’s code name when he established contact with the
Guardian journo. Greenwald won a Pulitzer for Public Service for what counts as
a remarkable piece of journalism. Based on conversations with Avtansh, and some
pondering thereafter, I write below.
The
government having access to your entire data, while seeming like a distantly
distasteful proposition, never struck home in my head as something truly
terrifying. That's till today. But think about it- as the movie mentioned in
passing, if the government can have complete access, any form of protests can
never happen. Identify the dissidents, and ensure that all their tweets pass
through your monitoring system, and voila, never can Tahrir Square happen. Or
better still, invest 5x more, create the enabling technology, and you can
monitor not just the dissidents, but everyone. And this is exactly what was
happening – the NSA snooped on 1.2 Billion people. The world of East Germany where
every envelope was unsealed , read, and resealed, and the tyrannies of the
Stasi (East German secret police) as depicted poignantly in the Lives of Others,
come to my mind. Just that the process now is automated and quicker and
more efficient.
One major
issue with governmental snooping is, how the government would decide where to
draw the line on multiple fronts. The first line is the motive - What started
as the war against terrorism, ended up with Angela Merkel’s phone being tapped.
And once you have Merkel’s phone on tap, why not use it for Foreign policy
decisions? Then comes the line on access – now if the head of Halliburton,
who’s say the POTUS’ close chum and major campaign donor, has access to the
line on the CEO of Transocean (France), what’s to stop him from getting access
and getting winning information on a bid for drilling a well in Mozambique? And
finally, the line between passive listening and active action- why listen and
wait, why not suppress and thus nip the problem right in the bud? If all these vaguely visible lines (and many
more) are breached, then power becomes dangerously concentrated, in the hands
of say the US, and more crucially, in the hands of a few individuals, say the
POTUS, and a few others.
And
what’s the issue with concentration of power? As long as it’s a democracy with
all its checks and balances, its fine, right? No, remember Indira Gandhi. If
she had access to complete information, and could suppress information of
dissidents going behind bars, and what news gets reported, what’s to separate
the India of 1975 from the India of 1984, replacing the Big Brother with the
Big Sister? Information is power, all
information about everyone - a possibility in today’s world as demonstrated by
the NSA – is absolute power. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even for
the noblest of souls, it may be just too tempting.
Then
there’s this associated issue of concentration of information. Because the NSA was not dealing with just verizon and AT&T, they were intercepting Google, Facebook and Skype, too. This has been
adequately dealt with in a number of glamorous sci-fi books and movies, take for example Die Hard 4.0 and the Fire Sail. And this good Sci-fi book I read about robots gone rogue- Robocalypse, by (Robotics PhD) Daniel Wilson. The humans battle it out by "taking full advantage of human adaptability and ingenuity" and taking unpredictable actions such as moving only on terrains where robots can't move. Once you control
information, in today’s networked world, you control a lot of physical assets.
Including weapon systems. Automobiles. Trains. Robots. And telephones can be thought of as sensors - voice sensors. And with today's phones, sensing includes location, fitness, assets (through online purchases), video (through skype sessions), your social networks (who are your friends/vulnerabilities). That's a ridiculous amount of information for the government to justify holding, and lethal if it falls into the wrong hands.
Thinking
about it, a multipolar and decentralized world then has merits. Keep those big
idealogical barriers alive between the Venezuelas and the Russias of the world,
and the US - so these other poles can act as a “check and balance” and shelter
the Assanges and the Snowden’s. It’s intriguing that Assange today actually
heads an organization that helps procure asylum for political whistleblower.
Thumbs up, Ju.
The movie
mentions in passing that in today’s wide open and boundary-less world, privacy
equals freedom, and taking away privacy means taking away freedom. Europe and
the US, with their more individualistic culture and evolved dialogues on
freedom and self-expression, are where the protests against snooping would be
strongest. Collectivist cultures like Asia may not protest so vehemently
against privacy invasions.
However, I
wrote above, it’s mentioned in “passing”, and that’s where the issue with the
movie CitizenFour lies – there are too many “in passing” references to
intriguing lines of thought. It spends too much time initially on Ed Snowden
the man, and that too without really doing a fabulous job of it, and the
implications of snooping are left for passing remarks and brief clips from the
CNNs and the BBCs. On such a fantastically thought provoking topic, the movie
could have stoked much more.
Last words-
this blog post mentions NSA a couple times, and Assange and Snowden a few
times. Surely, the intelligent people at NSA would have put some filters to let
this post and the author through to some level of scrutiny. While this is amusing to some
degree, it is also slightly chilling. Think about it.
Labels: Cinemas
Comments:
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I watched that fifth estate movie, don't know much. But it seems there was a bit of a question mark over Ju's release of sensitive material to the press. Oh and watch John Oliver interview Ed Snowden.
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