MESSAGE
| DATE | 2014-05-29 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] where to put this.
|
Honestly, this is a very long winded and not very useful or insightful
analysis of the situation.
I read for 20 minutes and relized i was only a quarter of the way through
with no useful point being made.
:(
On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 04:28:19PM -0400, Redpill wrote:
> Wonderful essay to counter Kerry?s asinine remarks from our old friend Ebin:
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-n
> sa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy
>
>
>
> Privacy under attack: the NSA files revealed new threats to democracy
>
>
>
> Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been
> covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain
> privacy is far from hopeless
>
>
>
> Eben Moglen
>
> Tuesday 27 May 2014 06.00 EDT
>
>
>
> In the third chapter of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
> Empire, Edward Gibbon gave two reasons why the slavery into which the Romans
> had tumbled under Augustus and his successors left them more wretched than
> any previous human slavery. In the first place, Gibbon said, the Romans had
> carried with them into slavery the culture of a free people: their language
> and their conception of themselves as human beings presupposed freedom. And
> thus, says Gibbon, for a long time the Romans preserved the sentiments ? or
> at least the ideas ? of a freeborn people. In the second place, the empire
> of the Romans filled all the world, and when that empire fell into the hands
> of a single person, the world was a safe and dreary prison for his enemies.
> As Gibbon wrote, to resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly.
>
>
>
> The power of that Roman empire rested in its leaders' control of
> communications. The Mediterranean was their lake. Across their European
> empire, from Scotland to Syria, they pushed roads that 15 centuries later
> were still primary arteries of European transportation. Down those roads the
> emperor marched his armies. Up those roads he gathered his intelligence. The
> emperors invented the posts to move couriers and messages at the fastest
> possible speed.
>
>
>
> Using that infrastructure, with respect to everything that involved the
> administration of power, the emperor made himself the best-informed person
> in the history of the world.
>
>
>
> That power eradicated human freedom. "Remember," said Cicero to Marcellus in
> exile, "wherever you are, you are equally within the power of the
> conqueror."
>
>
>
> The empire of the United States after the second world war also depended
> upon control of communications. This was more evident when, a mere 20 years
> later, the United States was locked in a confrontation of nuclear
> annihilation with the Soviet Union. In a war of submarines hidden in the
> dark below the continents, capable of eradicating human civilisation in less
> than an hour, the rule of engagement was "launch on warning". Thus the
> United States valued control of communications as highly as the Emperor
> Augustus. Its listeners too aspired to know everything.
>
>
>
> We all know that the United States has for decades spent as much on its
> military might as all other powers in the world combined. Americans are now
> realising what it means that we applied to the stealing of signals and the
> breaking of codes a similar proportion of our resources in relation to the
> rest of the world.
>
>
>
> The US system of listening comprises a military command controlling a large
> civilian workforce. That structure presupposes the foreign intelligence
> nature of listening activities. Military control was a symbol and guarantee
> of the nature of the activity being pursued. Wide-scale domestic
> surveillance under military command would have violated the fundamental
> principle of civilian control.
>
>
>
> Instead what it had was a foreign intelligence service responsible to the
> president as military commander-in-chief. The chain of military command
> absolutely ensured respect for the fundamental principle "no listening
> here". The boundary between home and away distinguished the permissible from
> the unconstitutional.
>
>
>
> The distinction between home and away was at least technically credible,
> given the reality of 20th-century communications media, which were
> hierarchically organised and very often state-controlled.
>
>
>
> When the US government chose to listen to other governments abroad ? to
> their militaries, to their diplomatic communications, to their policymakers
> where possible ? they were listening in a world of defined targets. The
> basic principle was: hack, tap, steal. We listened, we hacked in, we traded,
> we stole.
>
>
>
> In the beginning we listened to militaries and their governments. Later we
> monitored the flow of international trade as far as it engaged American
> national security interests.
>
>
>
> Last century we desperately fought and died against systems in which the
> state listened to every telephone conversation
>
>
>
> The regime that we built to defend ourselves against nuclear annihilation
> was restructured at the end of the 20th century. In the first place, the
> cold war ended and the Soviet Union dissolved. An entire establishment of
> national security repurposed itself. We no longer needed to spy upon an
> empire with 25,000 nuclear weapons pointed at us. Now we spied on the entire
> population of the world, in order to locate a few thousand people intent on
> various kinds of mass murder. Hence, we are told, spying on entire societies
> is the new normal.
>
>
>
> In the second place, the nature of human communication changed. We built a
> system for attacking fixed targets: a circuit, a phone number, a licence
> plate, a locale. The 20th-century question was how many targets could be
> simultaneously followed in a world where each of them required hack, tap,
> steal. But we then started to build a new form of human communication. From
> the moment we created the internet, two of the basic assumptions began to
> fail: the simplicity of "one target, one circuit" went away, and the
> difference between home and abroad vanished too.
>
>
>
> That distinction vanished in the United States because so much of the
> network and associated services, for better and worse, resided there. The
> question "Do we listen inside our borders?" was seemingly reduced to "Are we
> going to listen at all?"
>
>
>
> At this point, a vastly imprudent US administration intervened. Their
> defining characteristic was that they didn't think long before acting.
> Presented with a national calamity that also constituted a political
> opportunity, nothing stood between them and all the mistakes that haste can
> make for their children's children to repent at leisure. What they did ? in
> secret, with the assistance of judges appointed by a single man operating in
> secrecy, and with the connivance of many decent people who believed
> themselves to be acting to save the society ? was to unchain the listeners
> from law.
>
>
>
> Not only had circumstances destroyed the simplicity of "no listening
> inside", not only had fudging with the foreign intelligence surveillance act
> carried them where law no longer provided useful landmarks, but they
> actually wanted to do it. Their view of the nature of human power was
> Augustan, if not august. They wanted what it is forbidden to wise people to
> take unto themselves. And so they fell, and we fell with them.
>
>
>
> Our journalists failed. The New York Times allowed the 2004 election not to
> be informed by what it knew about the listening. Its decision to censor
> itself was, like all censorship and self-censorship, a mortal wound
> inflicted on democracy. We the people did not demand the end at the
> beginning. And now we're a long way in.
>
>
>
> Our military listeners have invaded the centre of an evolving net, where
> conscriptable digital superbrains gather intelligence on the human race for
> purposes of bagatelle and capitalism. In the US, the telecommunications
> companies have legal immunity for their complicity, thus easing the way
> further.
>
>
>
> The invasion of our net was secret, and we did not know that we should
> resist. But resistance developed as a fifth column among the listeners
> themselves.
>
>
>
> In Hong Kong, Edward Snowden said something straightforward and useful:
> analysts, he said, are not bad people, and they don't want to think of
> themselves that way. But they came to calculate that if a programme produced
> anything useful, it was justified.
>
>
>
> It was not the analysts' job to weigh the fundamental morality for us.
>
>
>
> In a democracy, that task is given by the people to the leaders they elect.
> These leaders fell ? and we fell with them ? because they refused to adhere
> to the morality of freedom. The civilian workers in their agencies felt
> their failure first. From the middle of last decade, people began to blow
> whistles all over the field. These courageous workers sacrificed their
> careers, frightened their families, sometimes suffered personal destruction,
> to say that there was something deeply wrong.
>
>
>
> The response was rule by fear. Two successive US administrations sought to
> deal with the whistleblowers among the listeners by meting out the harshest
> possible treatment.
>
>
>
> Snowden said in Hong Kong that he was sacrificing himself in order to save
> the world from a system like this one, which is "constrained only by policy
> documents". The political ideas of Snowden are worthy of our respect and our
> deep consideration. But for now it is sufficient to say that he was not
> exaggerating the nature of the difficulty.
>
>
>
> Because of Snowden, we now know that the listeners undertook to do what they
> repeatedly promised respectable expert opinion they would never do. They
> always said they would not attempt to break the crypto that secures the
> global financial system.
>
>
>
> That was false.
>
>
>
> When Snowden disclosed the existence of the NSA's Bullrun programme we
> learned that NSA had lied for years to the financiers who believe themselves
> entitled to the truth from the government they own. The NSA had not only
> subverted technical standards, attempting to break the encryption that holds
> the global financial industry together, it had also stolen the keys to as
> many vaults as possible. With this disclosure the NSA forfeited respectable
> opinion around the world. Their reckless endangerment of those who don't
> accept danger from the United States government was breathtaking.
>
>
>
> The empire of the United States was the empire of exported liberty. What it
> had to offer all around the world was liberty and freedom. After
> colonisation, after European theft, after forms of state-created horror, it
> promised a world free from state oppression.
>
>
>
> Last century we were prepared to sacrifice many of the world's great cities
> and tens of millions of human lives. We bore those costs in order to smash
> regimes we called "totalitarian", in which the state grew so powerful and so
> invasive that it no longer recognised any border of private life. We
> desperately fought and died against systems in which the state listened to
> every telephone conversation and kept a list of everybody every troublemaker
> knew.
>
>
>
> Snowden spied on behalf of the human race. As he said, only the American
> people could decide if his sacrifice was worth it.
>
>
>
> But in the past 10 years, after the morality of freedom was withdrawn, the
> state has begun fastening the procedures of totalitarianism on the substance
> of democratic society.
>
>
>
> There is no historical precedent for the proposition that the procedures of
> totalitarianism are compatible with the system of enlightened, individual
> and democratic self-governance. Such an argument would be doomed to failure.
> It is enough to say in opposition that omnipresent invasive listening
> creates fear. And that fear is the enemy of reasoned, ordered liberty.
>
>
>
> It is utterly inconsistent with the American ideal to attempt to fasten
> procedures of totalitarianism on American constitutional self-governance.
> But there is an even deeper inconsistency between those ideals and the
> subjection of every other society on earth to mass surveillance.
>
>
>
> Some of the system's servants came to understand that it was being sustained
> not with, but against, democratic order. They knew their vessel had come
> unmoored in the dark, and was sailing without a flag. When they blew the
> whistle, the system blew back at them. In the end ? at least so far, until
> tomorrow ? there was Snowden, who saw everything that happened and watched
> the fate of others who spoke up.
>
>
>
> He understood, as Chelsea Manning also always understood, that when you wear
> the uniform you consent to the power. He knew his business very well. Young
> as he was, as he said in Hong Kong, "I've been a spy all my life." So he did
> what it takes great courage to do in the presence of what you believe to be
> radical injustice. He wasn't first, he won't be last, but he sacrificed his
> life as he knew it to tell us things we needed to know. Snowden committed
> espionage on behalf of the human race. He knew the price, he knew the
> reason. But as he said, only the American people could decide, by their
> response, whether sacrificing his life was worth it.
>
>
>
> So our most important effort is to understand the message: to understand its
> context, purpose, and meaning, and to experience the consequences of having
> received the communication.
>
>
>
> Even once we have understood, it will be difficult to judge Snowden, because
> there is always much to say on both sides when someone is greatly right too
> soon.
>
>
>
> In the United States, those who were "premature anti-fascists" suffered. It
> was right to be right only when all others were right. It was wrong to be
> right when only people we disagreed with held the views that we were later
> to adopt ourselves.
>
>
>
> Snowden has been quite precise. He understands his business. He has spied on
> injustice for us and has told us what we require in order to do the job and
> get it right. And if we have a responsibility, then it is to learn, now,
> before somebody concludes that learning should be prohibited.
>
>
>
> In considering the political meaning of Snowden's message and its
> consequences, we must begin by discarding for immediate purposes pretty much
> everything said by the presidents, the premiers, the chancellors and the
> senators. Public discussion by these "leaders" has provided a remarkable
> display of misdirection, misleading and outright lying. We need instead to
> focus on the thinking behind Snowden's activities. What matters most is how
> deeply the whole of the human race has been ensnared in this system of
> pervasive surveillance.
>
>
>
> We begin where the leaders are determined not to end, with the question of
> whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with
> the kind of massive, pervasive surveillance into which the United States
> government has led not only its people but the world.
>
>
>
> This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.
>
>
>
> For almost everyone who lived through the 20th century ? at least its middle
> half ? the idea that freedom was consistent with the procedures of
> totalitarianism was self-evidently false. Hence, as we watch responses to
> Snowden's revelations we see that massive invasion of privacy triggers
> justified anxiety among the survivors of totalitarianism about the fate of
> liberty. To understand why, we need to understand more closely what our
> conception of "privacy" really contains.
>
>
>
> Our concept of "privacy" combines three things: first is secrecy, or our
> ability to keep the content of our messages known only to those we intend to
> receive them. Second is anonymity, or secrecy about who is sending and
> receiving messages, where the content of the messages may not be secret at
> all. It is very important that anonymity is an interest we can have both in
> our publishing and in our reading. Third is autonomy, or our ability to make
> our own life decisions free from any force that has violated our secrecy or
> our anonymity. These three ? secrecy, anonymity and autonomy ? are the
> principal components of a mixture we call "privacy".
>
>
>
> Without secrecy, democratic self-government is impossible. Without secrecy,
> people may not discuss public affairs with those they choose, excluding
> those with whom they do not wish to converse.
>
>
>
> Anonymity is necessary for the conduct of democratic politics. Not only must
> we be able to choose with whom we discuss politics, we must also be able to
> protect ourselves against retaliation for our expressions of political
> ideas. Autonomy is vitiated by the wholesale invasion of secrecy and
> privacy. Free decision-making is impossible in a society where every move is
> monitored, as a moment's consideration of the state of North Korea will
> show, as would any conversation with those who lived through 20th-century
> totalitarianisms, or any historical study of the daily realities of American
> chattel slavery before our civil war.
>
>
>
> In other words, privacy is a requirement of democratic self-government. The
> effort to fasten the procedures of pervasive surveillance on human society
> is the antithesis of liberty. This is the conversation that all the "don't
> listen to my mobile phone!" misdirection has not been about. If it were up
> to national governments, the conversation would remain at this phoney level
> forever.
>
>
>
> The US government and its listeners have not advanced any convincing
> argument that what they do is compatible with the morality of freedom, US
> constitutional law or international human rights. They will instead attempt,
> as much as possible, to change the subject, and, whenever they cannot change
> the subject, to blame the messenger.
>
>
>
> One does not need access to classified documents to see how the military and
> strategic thinkers in the United States adapted to the end of the cold war
> by planning pervasive surveillance of the world's societies. From the early
> 1990s, the public literature of US defence policy shows, strategic and
> military planners foresaw a world in which the United States had no
> significant state adversary. Thus, we would be forced to engage in a series
> of "asymmetric conflicts", meaning "guerrilla wars" with "non-state actors".
>
>
>
> In the course of that redefinition of US strategic posture, the military
> strategists and their intelligence community colleagues came to regard US
> rights to communications privacy as the equivalent of sanctuary for
> guerrillas. They conceived that it would be necessary for the US military,
> the listeners, to go after the "sanctuaries".
>
>
>
> Then, at the opening of the 21st century, a US administration that will go
> down in history for its tendency to think last and shoot first bought ?
> hook, line and sinker ? the entire "denying sanctuary", pervasive
> surveillance, "total information awareness" scheme. Within a very short time
> after January 2002, mostly in secret, they put it all together.
>
>
>
> The consequences around the world were remarkably uncontroversial. By and
> large, states approved or accepted. After September 2001, the United States
> government used quite extraordinary muscle around the world: you were either
> with us or against us. Moreover, many other governments had come to base
> their national security systems crucially on cooperation with American
> listening.
>
>
>
> By the time the present US administration had settled into office, senior
> policymakers thought there was multilateral consensus on listening to other
> societies: it could not be stopped and therefore it shouldn't be limited.
> The Chinese agreed. The US agreed. The Europeans agreed; their position was
> somewhat reluctant, but they were dependent on US listening and hadn't a lot
> of power to object.
>
>
>
> Nobody told the people of the world. By the end of the first decade of the
> 21st century, a gap opened between what the people of the world thought
> their rights were and what their governments had given away in return for
> intelligence useful only to the governments themselves. This gap was so
> wide, so fundamental to the meaning of democracy, that those who operated
> the system began to disbelieve in its legitimacy. As they should have done.
>
>
>
> Snowden saw what happened to other whistleblowers, and behaved accordingly.
> His political theory has been quite exact and entirely consistent. He says
> the existence of these programmes, undisclosed to the American people, is a
> fundamental violation of American democratic values. Surely there can be no
> argument with that.
>
>
>
> Snowden's position is that efforts so comprehensive, so overwhelmingly
> powerful, and so conducive to abuse, should not be undertaken save with
> democratic consent. He has expressed recurrently his belief that the
> American people are entitled to give or withhold that informed consent. But
> Snowden has also identified the fastening of those programmes on the global
> population as a problematic act, which deserves a form of moral and ethical
> analysis that goes beyond mere raison d'?tat.
>
>
>
> Hopelessness is merely the condition they want you to catch, not one you
> have to have
>
>
>
> I think Snowden means that we should make those decisions not in the narrow,
> national self-interest, but with some heightened moral sense of what is
> appropriate for a nation that holds itself out as a beacon of liberty to
> humanity.
>
>
>
> We can speak, of course, about American constitutional law and about the
> importance of American legal phenomena ? rules, protections, rights, duties
> ? with respect to all of this. But we should be clear that, when we talk
> about the American constitutional tradition with respect to freedom and
> slavery, we're talking about more than what is written in the law books.
>
>
>
> We face two claims ? you meet them everywhere you turn ? that summarise the
> politics against which we are working. One argument says: "It's hopeless,
> privacy is gone, why struggle?" The other says: "I'm not doing anything
> wrong, why should I care?"
>
>
>
> These are actually the most significant forms of opposition that we face in
> doing what we know we ought to do.
>
>
>
> In the first place, our struggle to retain our privacy is far from hopeless.
> Snowden has described to us what armour still works. His purpose was to
> distinguish between those forms of network communication that are hopelessly
> corrupted and no longer usable, those that are endangered by a continuing
> assault on the part of an agency gone rogue, and those that, even with their
> vast power, all their wealth, and all their misplaced ambition,
> conscientiousness and effort, they still cannot break.
>
>
>
> Hopelessness is merely the condition they want you to catch, not one you
> have to have.
>
>
>
> So far as the other argument is concerned, we owe it to ourselves to be
> quite clear in response: "If we are not doing anything wrong, then we have a
> right to resist."
>
>
>
> If we are not doing anything wrong, then we have a right to do everything we
> can to maintain the traditional balance between us and power that is
> listening. We have a right to be obscure. We have a right to mumble. We have
> a right to speak languages they do not get. We have a right to meet when and
> where and how we please.
>
>
>
> We have an American constitutional tradition against general warrants. It
> was formed in the 18th century for good reason. We limit the state's ability
> to search and seize to specific places and things that a neutral magistrate
> believes it is reasonable to allow.
>
>
>
> That principle was dear to the First Congress, which put it in our bill of
> rights, because it was dear to British North Americans; because in the
> course of the 18th century they learned what executive government could do
> with general warrants to search everything, everywhere, for anything they
> didn't like, while forcing local officials to help them do it. That was a
> problem in Massachusetts in 1761 and it remained a problem until the end of
> British rule in North America. Even then, it was a problem, because the
> presidents, senators and chancellors were also unprincipled in their
> behaviour. Thomas Jefferson, too, like the president now, talked a better
> game than he played.
>
>
>
> This principle is clear enough. But there are only nine votes on the US
> supreme court, and only they count right now. We must wait to see how many
> of them are prepared to face the simple unconstitutionality of a rogue
> system much too big to fail. But because those nine votes are the only votes
> that matter, the rest of us must go about our business in other ways.
>
>
>
> The American constitutional tradition we admire was made mostly by people
> who had fled Europe and come to North America in order to be free. It is
> their activity, politically and intellectually, that we find deposited in
> the documents that made the republic.
>
>
>
> But there is a second constitutional tradition. It was made by people who
> were brought here against their will, or who were born into slavery, and who
> had to run away, here, in order to be free. This second constitutional
> tradition is slightly different in its nature from the first, although it
> conduces, eventually, to similar conclusions.
>
>
>
> We face two claims. One says: 'It's hopeless, privacy is gone, why
> struggle?' The other: 'I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?'.
> These are actually the most significant forms of opposition we face.
>
>
>
> Running away from slavery is a group activity. Running away from slavery
> requires the assistance of those who believe that slavery is wrong. People
> in the United States have forgotten how much of our constitutional tradition
> was made in the contact between people who needed to run away in order to be
> free and people who knew that they needed to help, because slavery is wrong.
>
>
>
> We have now forgotten that in the summer of 1854, when Anthony Burns ? who
> had run away from slavery in Richmond, Virginia ? was returned to slavery by
> a state judge acting as a federal commissioner under the second fugitive
> slave act, Boston itself had to be placed under martial law for three whole
> days. Federal troops lined the streets, as Burns was marched down to Boston
> Harbor and put aboard a ship to be sent back to slavery. If Boston had not
> been held down by force, it would have risen.
>
>
>
> When Frederick Douglass ran away from slavery in 1838, he had the help of
> his beloved Anna Murray, who sent him part of her savings and the sailor's
> clothing that he wore. He had the help of a free black seaman who gave him
> identity papers. Many dedicated people risked much to help him reach New
> York.
>
>
>
> Our constitutional tradition is not merely contained in the negative rights
> found in the bill of rights. It is also contained in the history of a
> communal, often formally illegal, struggle for liberty against slavery. This
> part of our tradition says that liberty from oppressive control must be
> accorded people everywhere, as a right. It says that slavery is simply
> wrong, that it cannot be tolerated or justified by the master's fear or need
> for security.
>
>
>
> So the constitutional tradition Americans should be defending now is a
> tradition that extends far beyond whatever boundary the fourth amendment has
> in space, place, or time. Americans should be defending not merely a right
> to be free from the oppressive attentions of the national government, not
> merely fighting for something embodied in the due process clause of the 14th
> amendment. We should rather be fighting against the procedures of
> totalitarianism because slavery is wrong. Because fastening the surveillance
> of the master on the whole human race is wrong. Because providing the
> energy, the money, the technology, the system for subduing everybody's
> privacy around the world ? for destroying sanctuary in American freedom of
> speech ? is wrong.
>
>
>
> Snowden has provided the most valuable thing that democratic self-governing
> people can have, namely information about what is going on. If we are to
> exercise our rights as self-governing people, using the information he has
> given us, we should have clear in our minds the political ideas upon which
> we act. They are not parochial, or national, or found in the records of
> supreme court decisions alone.
>
>
>
> A nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men
> are created equal, enslaved millions of people. It washed away that sin in a
> terrible war. Americans should learn from that, and are called upon now to
> do so.
>
>
>
> Knowing what we know, thanks to Snowden, citizens everywhere must demand two
> things of their governments: "In the first place," we must say to our
> rulers, "you have a responsibility, a duty, to protect our rights by
> guarding us against the spying of outsiders." Every government has that
> responsibility.
>
>
>
> It must protect the rights of its citizens to be free from intrusive mass
> surveillance by other states. No government can pretend to sovereignty and
> responsibility unless it makes every effort within its power and its means
> to ensure that outcome.
>
>
>
> In the second place, every government must subject its domestic listening to
> the rule of law. The overwhelming arrogance of the listeners and the
> foolishness of the last administration has left the US government in an
> unnecessary hole. Until the last administration unchained the listeners from
> law, the US government could have held up its head before the world,
> proclaiming that only its listeners were subject to the rule of law. It
> would have been an accurate boast.
>
>
>
> For almost nothing, history will record, they threw that away.
>
>
>
> To the citizens of the United States, a greater responsibility is given. The
> government is projecting immensities of power into the destruction of
> privacy in the world's other societies. It is doing so without any
> democratic check or control, and its people must stop it. Americans' role as
> the beacon of liberty in the world requires no less of us.
>
>
>
> Freedom has been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled
> her. Europe has been bullied into treating her like a stranger and Britain
> would arrest her at Heathrow if she arrived. The president of the United
> States has demanded that no one shall receive the fugitive, and maybe only
> the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, wants to prepare in time an asylum
> for mankind.
>
>
>
> Political leaders around the world have had much to say since Snowden began
> his revelations, but not one statement that consisted of "I regret
> subjecting my own people to these procedures". The German chancellor, though
> triumphantly re-elected with not a cloud in her political sky, is in no
> position to say, "I agreed with the Americans to allow 40m telephone calls a
> day to be intercepted in Germany; I just want them to stop listening to my
> phone!"
>
>
>
> The US listeners are having a political crisis beyond their previous
> imagining. They do not like to appear in the spotlight, or indeed to be
> visible at all. Now they have lost their credibility with the cybersecurity
> industry, which has realised that they have broken their implicit promises
> about what they would not hack. The global financial industry is overwhelmed
> with fear at what they've done. The other US government agencies they
> usually count on for support are fleeing them.
>
>
>
> We will never again have a similar moment of political disarray on the side
> that works against freedom. Not only have they made the issue clear to
> everybody ? not only have they created martyrs in our comrades at Fort
> Leavenworth, at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and at an undisclosed
> location in Moscow ? not only have they lit this fire beyond the point where
> they can piss it out, but they have lost their armour. They stand before us
> in the fullness of who they really are. It is up to us to show that we
> recognise them.
>
>
>
> What they have done is to build a state of permanent war into the net.
> Twelve years into a war that never seems to end, they are making the net a
> wartime place forever. We must reimagine what a net at peace would look
> like: cyberpeace. Young people around the world now working on the theory of
> cyberpeace are doing the most important political work of our time. We will
> now have to provide what democracies provide best, which is peace. We have
> to be willing to declare victory and go home. When we do, we have to leave
> behind a net that is no longer in a state of war, a net which no longer uses
> surveillance to destroy the privacy that founds democracy.
>
>
>
> This is a matter of international public law. In the end this is about
> something like prohibiting chemical weapons, or landmines. A matter of
> disarmament treaties. A matter of peace enforcement.
>
>
>
> What if every book for the past 500 years had been reporting its readers
> at headquarters?
>
>
>
> The difficulty is that we have not only our good and patriotic fellow
> citizens to deal with, for whom an election is a sufficient remedy, but we
> have also an immense structure of private surveillance that has come into
> existence. This structure has every right to exist in a free market, but is
> now creating ecological disaster from which governments alone have
> benefited.
>
>
>
> We have to consider not only, therefore, what our politics are with respect
> to the states, but also with respect to the enterprises.
>
>
>
> Instead we are still at a puppet show in which the people who are the
> legitimate objects of international surveillance ? namely politicians, heads
> of state, military officers, and diplomats ? are screaming about how they
> should not be listened to. As though they were us and had a right to be left
> alone.
>
>
>
> And that, of course, is what they want. They want to confuse us. They want
> us to think that they are us ? that they're not the people who allowed this
> to happen, who cheered it on, who went into business with it.
>
>
>
> We must cope with the problems their deceptions created. Our listeners have
> destroyed the internet freedom policy of the US government. They had a good
> game so long as they could play both sides. But now we have comrades and
> colleagues around the world who are working for the freedom of the net in
> dangerous societies; they have depended upon material support and assistance
> from the United States government, and they now have every reason to be
> frightened.
>
>
>
> What if the underground railroad had been constantly under efforts of
> penetration by the United States government on behalf of slavery?
>
>
>
> What if every book for the past 500 years had been reporting its readers at
> headquarters?
>
>
>
> The bad news for the people of the world is we were lied to thoroughly by
> everybody for nearly 20 years. The good news is that Snowden has told us the
> truth.
>
> A server room at Facebook
>
>
>
> Edward Snowden has revealed problems for which we need solutions. The vast
> surveillance-industrial state that has grown up since 2001 could not have
> been constructed without government contractors and the data-mining
> industry. Both are part of a larger ecological crisis brought on by
> industrial overreaching. We have failed to grasp the nature of this crisis
> because we have misunderstood the nature of privacy. Businesses have sought
> to profit from our confusion, and governments have taken further advantage
> of it, threatening the survival of democracy itself.
>
>
>
> In this context, we must remember that privacy is about our social
> environment, not about isolated transactions we individually make with
> others. When we decide to give away our personal information, we are also
> undermining the privacy of other people. Privacy is therefore always a
> relation among many people, rather than a transaction between two.
>
>
>
> Many people take money from you by concealing this distinction. They offer
> you free email service, for example. In return, they want you to let them
> read all the mail. Their stated purpose is advertising to you. It's just a
> transaction between two parties. Or, they offer you free web hosting for
> your social communications, and then they watch everybody looking at
> everything.
>
>
>
> This is convenient, for them, but fraudulent. If you accept this supposedly
> bilateral offer, to provide email service to you for free as long as it can
> all be read, then everybody who corresponds with you is subjected to this
> bargain. If your family contains somebody who receives mail at Gmail, then
> Google gets a copy of all correspondence in your family. If another member
> of your family receives mail at Yahoo, then Yahoo receives a copy of all the
> correspondence in your family as well.
>
>
>
> Perhaps even this degree of corporate surveillance of your family's email is
> too much for you. But as Snowden's revelations showed, to the discomfiture
> of governments and companies alike, the companies are also sharing all that
> mail with power ? which is buying it, getting courts to order it turned
> over, or stealing it ? whether the companies like it or not.
>
>
>
> The same will be true if you decide to live your social life on a website
> where the creep who runs it monitors every social interaction, keeping a
> copy of everything said, and also watching everybody watch everybody else.
> If you bring new "friends" to the service, you are attracting them to the
> creepy inspection, forcing them to undergo it with you.
>
>
>
> This is an ecological problem, because our individual choices worsen the
> condition of the group as a whole. The service companies' interest, but not
> ours, is to hide this view of the problem, and concentrate on getting
> individual consent. From a legal perspective, the essence of transacting is
> consent. If privacy is transactional, your consent to surveillance is all
> the commercial spy needs. But if privacy is correctly understood, consent is
> usually irrelevant, and focusing on it is fundamentally inappropriate.
>
>
>
> We do not, with respect to clean air and clean water, set the limits of
> tolerable pollution by consent. We have socially established standard of
> cleanliness, which everybody has to meet.
>
>
>
> Environmental law is not law about consent. But with respect to privacy we
> have been allowed to fool ourselves.
>
>
>
> We've lost the ability to read anonymously. Without anonymity in reading
> there is no freedom of mind, there's literally slavery
>
>
>
> What is actually a subject of environmental regulation has been sold to us
> as a mere matter of bilateral bargaining. The facts show this is completely
> untrue.
>
>
>
> An environmental devastation has been produced by the ceaseless pursuit of
> profit from data-mining in every legal way imaginable. Restraints that
> should have existed in the interest of protection against environmental
> degradation have never been imposed.
>
>
>
> There is a tendency to blame oversharing. We are often told that the real
> problem of privacy is that kids are just sharing too darn much. When you
> democratise media, which is what we are doing with the net, ordinary people
> will naturally say more than they ever said before. This is not the problem.
> In a free society people should be protected in their right to say as much
> or as little as they want.
>
>
>
> The real problem is that we are losing the anonymity of reading, for which
> nobody has contracted at all.
>
>
>
> We have lost the ability to read anonymously, but the loss is concealed from
> us because of the way we built the web. We gave people programs called
> "browsers" that everyone could use, but we made programs called "web
> servers" that only geeks could use ? very few people have ever read a web
> server log. This is a great failing in our social education about
> technology. It's equivalent to not showing children what happens if cars
> collide and people aren't wearing seat belts.
>
>
>
> We don't explain to people how a web server log captures in detail the
> activity of readers, nor how much you can learn about people, because of
> what and how they read. From the logs, you can learn how long each reader
> spends on each page, how she reads it, where she goes next, what she does or
> searches for on the basis of what she's just read. If you can collect all
> that information in the logs, then you are beginning to possess what you
> ought not to have.
>
>
>
> Without anonymity in reading there is no freedom of the mind. Indeed, there
> is literally slavery. Reading was the pathway, the abolitionist Frederick
> Douglass wrote, from slavery to freedom. Writing his memoir of his own
> journey, Douglass recalled that when one of his owners tried to prevent him
> from reading, "I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing
> difficulty ? to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man."
>
>
>
> But what if every book and newspaper he touched had reported him?
>
>
>
> If you have a Facebook account, Facebook is surveilling every single moment
> you spend there. Moreover, much more importantly, every web page you touch
> that has a Facebook "like" button on it which, whether you click the button
> or not, will report your reading of that page to Facebook.
>
>
>
> If the newspaper you read every day has Facebook "like" buttons or similar
> services' buttons on those pages, then Facebook or the other service watches
> you read the newspaper: it knows which stories you read and how long you
> spent on them.
>
>
>
> Every time you tweet a URL, Twitter is shortening the URL for you. But it is
> also arranging that anybody who clicks on that URL will be monitored by
> Twitter as they read. You are not only helping people know what's on the
> web, but also helping Twitter read over everybody's shoulder everything you
> recommend.
>
>
>
> This isn't transactional, this is ecological. This is an environmental
> destruction of other people's freedom to read. Your activity is designed to
> help them find things they want to read. Twitter's activity is to disguise
> the surveillance of the resulting reading from everybody.
>
>
>
> We allowed this system to grow up so quickly around us that we had no time
> to understand its implications. By the time the implications have been
> thought about, the people who understand are not interested in talking,
> because they have got an edge, and that edge is directed at you.
>
>
>
> Commercial surveillance then attracts government attention, with two results
> that Snowden has documented for us: complicity and outright thievery.
>
>
>
> The data-mining companies believed, they say, that they were merely in a
> situation of complicity with government. Having created unsafe technological
> structures that mined you, they thought they were merely engaged in
> undisclosed bargaining over how much of what they had on you they should
> deliver. This was, of course, a mingled game of greed and fear.
>
>
>
> What the US data-mining companies basically believed, or wanted us to
> believe they believed until Snowden woke them, was that by complicity they
> had gained immunity from actual thievery. But we have now learned their
> complicity bought them nothing. They sold us out halfway, and government
> stole the rest.
>
>
>
> They discovered that what they had expected by way of honesty from the US
> listeners, the NSA and other agencies, they hadn't got at all. The US
> listeners' attitude evidently was: "What's ours is ours, and what's yours is
> negotiable. Unless we steal it first."
>
>
>
> Like the world financial industry, the great data-mining companies took the
> promises of the US military listeners too seriously. That, at any rate, is
> the charitable interpretation of their conduct. They thought there were
> limits to what power would do.
>
>
>
> Thanks to Snowden, for the data-miners, as for the US listeners, the
> situation is no longer politically controllable. They have lost their
> credibility, their trustworthiness, before the world. If they fail to regain
> their customers' trust, notwithstanding how convenient, even necessary,
> their services may seem to us, they are finished.
>
>
>
> Environmental problems ? such as climate change, water pollution, slavery,
> or the destruction of privacy ? are not solved transactionally by
> individuals.
>
>
>
> It takes a union to destroy slavery. The essence of our difficulty, too, is
> union.
>
>
>
> Another characteristic of the great data-miners is that there is no union
> within or around them.
>
>
>
> They are now public corporations, but the union of shareholders is
> ineffective in controlling their environmental misdoing. These companies are
> remarkably opaque with respect to all that they actually do, and they are so
> valuable that shareholders will not kill the goose that lays the golden egg
> by inquiring whether their business methods are ethical. A few powerful
> individuals control all the real votes in these companies. Their workforces
> do not have a collective voice.
>
>
>
> Snowden has been clear all along that the remedy for this environmental
> destruction is democracy. But he has also repeatedly pointed out that, where
> workers cannot speak up and there is no collective voice, there is no
> protection for the public's right to know.
>
>
>
> When there is no collective voice for those who are within structures that
> deceive and oppress, then somebody has to act courageously on his own.
> Before Augustus, the Romans of the late republic knew the secrecy of the
> ballot was essential to the people's right.
>
>
>
> In every country in the world that holds meaningful elections, Google knows
> how you are going to vote. It's already shaping your political coverage for
> you, in your customised news feed, based upon what you want to read, and who
> you are, and what you like. Not only does it know how you're going to vote,
> it's helping to confirm you in your decision to vote that way ? unless some
> other message has been purchased by a sponsor.
>
>
>
> Without the anonymity of reading there is no democracy. I mean of course
> that there aren't fair and free elections, but much more deeply than that I
> mean there is no such thing as free self-governance.
>
>
>
> And we are still very ill-informed, because there are no unions seeking to
> raise ethical issues inside the data-miners, and we have too few Snowdens.
>
>
>
> The futures of the data-miners are not all the same. Google as an
> organisation has concerned itself with the ethical issues of what it does
> from the very beginning. Larry Page and Sergey Brin [the founders of Google]
> did not stumble randomly on the idea that they had a special obligation not
> to be evil. They understood the dangerous possibilities implicit in the
> situation they were creating.
>
>
>
> It is technically feasible for Google to make Gmail into a system that is
> truly secure and secret, though not anonymous, for its users.
>
>
>
> Mail could be encrypted ? using public keys in a web of trust ? within
> users' own computers, in their browsers; email at rest at Gmail could be
> encrypted using algorithms to which the user, rather than Google, has the
> relevant keys.
>
>
>
> Google would be forgoing Gmail's scant profit, but its actions would be
> consistent with the idea that the net belongs to its users throughout the
> world. In the long run it is good for Google to be seen not only to believe,
> but to act upon, this idea, for it is the only way for it to regain those
> users' trust. There are many thoughtful, dedicated people at Google who must
> choose between doing what is right and blowing the whistle on what is wrong.
>
>
>
> The situation at Facebook is different. Facebook is strip-mining human
> society. Watching everyone share everything in their social lives and
> instrumenting the web to surveil everything they read outside the system is
> inherently unethical.
>
>
>
> But we need no more from Facebook than truth in labelling. We need no rules,
> no punishments, no guidelines. We need nothing but the truth. Facebook
> should lean in and tell its users what it does.
>
>
>
> It should say: "We watch you every minute that you're here. We watch every
> detail of what you do. We have wired the web with 'like' buttons that inform
> on your reading automatically."
>
>
>
> To every parent Facebook should say: "Your children spend hours every day
> with us. We spy upon them much more efficiently than you will ever be able
> to. And we won't tell you what we know about them."
>
>
>
> Only that, just the truth. That will be enough. But the crowd that runs
> Facebook, that small bunch of rich and powerful people, will never lean in
> close enough to tell you the truth.
>
>
>
> Mark Zuckerberg recently spent $30m (?18m) buying up all the houses around
> his own in Palo Alto, California. Because he needs more privacy.
>
>
>
> So do we. We need to make demands for that privacy on both governments and
> companies alike. Governments, as I have said, must protect us against spying
> by other governments, and must subject their own domestic listening to the
> rule of law. Companies, to regain our trust, must be truthful about their
> practices and their relations with governments. We must know what they
> really do, so we can decide whether to give them our data.
>
>
>
> The president must end this war in the net, which deprives us of civil
> liberties under the guise of depriving foreign bad people of sanctuary
>
>
>
> A great deal of confusion has been created by the distinction between data
> and metadata, as though there were a difference and spying on metadata were
> less serious.
>
>
>
> Illegal interception of the content of a message breaks your secrecy.
> Illegal interception of the metadata of a message breaks your anonymity. It
> isn't less, it's just different. Most of the time it isn't less, it's more.
>
>
>
> In particular, the anonymity of reading is broken by the collection of
> metadata. It wasn't the content of the newspaper Douglass was reading that
> was the problem ? it was that he, a slave, dared to read it.
>
>
>
> The president can apologise to people for the cancellation of their health
> insurance policies, but he cannot merely apologise to the people for the
> cancellation of the constitution. When you are president of the United
> States, you cannot apologise for not being on Frederick Douglass's side.
>
>
>
> Nine votes in the US supreme court can straighten out what has happened to
> our law. But the US president has the only vote that matters concerning the
> ending of the war. All the governmental destruction of privacy that has been
> placed atop the larger ecological disaster created by industry, all of this
> spying is wartime stuff. The president must end this war in the net, which
> deprives us of civil liberties under the guise of depriving foreign bad
> people of sanctuary.
>
>
>
> A man who brings evidence to democracy of crimes against freedom is a hero.
> A man who steals the privacy of societies for his profit is a villain. We
> have sufficient villainy and not enough heroism. We have to name that
> difference strongly enough to encourage others to do right.
>
>
>
> We have seen that, with the relentlessness of military operation, the
> listeners in the US have embarked on a campaign against the privacy of the
> human race. They have compromised secrecy, destroyed anonymity, and
> adversely affected the autonomy of billions of people.
>
>
>
> They are doing this because they have been presented with a mission by an
> extraordinarily imprudent US administration, which ? having failed to
> prevent a very serious attack on civilians at home, largely by ignoring
> warnings ? decreed that it would never again be put in a position where it
> "should have known".
>
>
>
> The UK government must cease to vitiate the civil liberties of its
> people. It must cease to deny the freedom of the press
>
>
>
> The fundamental problem was the political, not the military, judgment
> involved. When military leaders are given objectives, they achieve them at
> whatever collateral cost they are not explicitly prohibited from incurring.
> That is why we regard civilian control of the military as a sine qua non of
> democracy. Democracy also requires an informed citizenry.
>
>
>
> About this, Snowden agrees with Thomas Jefferson [the chief author of
> America's Declaration of Independence], and pretty much everybody else who
> has ever seriously thought about the problem. Snowden has shown us the
> immense complicity of all governments. He has shown, in other words, that
> everywhere the policies the people want have been deliberately frustrated by
> their governments. They want to be protected against the spying of
> outsiders. They want their own government's national security surveillance
> activities to be conducted under the independent scrutiny that characterises
> the rule of law.
>
>
>
> In addition, the people of the United States are not ready to abandon our
> role as a beacon of liberty to the world. We are not prepared to go instead
> into the business of spreading the procedures of totalitarianism. We never
> voted for that. The people of the US do not want to become the secret police
> of the world. If we have drifted there because an incautious administration
> empowered the military, it is time for the people of the United States to
> register their conclusive democratic opinion.
>
>
>
> We are not the only people in the world to have exigent political
> responsibilities. The government of the UK must cease to vitiate the civil
> liberties of its people, it must cease to use its territory and its
> transport facilities as an auxiliary to American military misbehaviour. And
> it must cease to deny freedom of the press. It must stop pressuring
> publishers who seek to inform the world about threats to democracy, while it
> goes relatively easy on publishers who spy on the families of murdered
> girls.
>
>
>
> The chancellor of Germany must stop talking about her mobile phone and start
> talking about whether it is OK to deliver all the telephone calls and text
> messages in Germany to the US. Governments that operate under constitutions
> protecting freedom of expression have to inquire, urgently, whether that
> freedom exists when everything is spied on, monitored, listened to.
>
>
>
> In addition to politics, we do have lawyering to do. Defending the rule of
> law is always lawyers' work. In some places those lawyers will need to be
> extremely courageous; everywhere they will need to be well trained;
> everywhere they will need our support and our concern. But it is also clear
> that subjecting government listening to the rule of law is not the only
> lawyers' work involved.
>
>
>
> As we have seen, the relations between the military listeners of the United
> States, listeners elsewhere in the world, and the big data-mining businesses
> are too complex to be safe for us. Snowden's revelations have shown that the
> US data-mining giants were intimidated, seduced, and also betrayed by the
> listeners. This should not have surprised them, but it apparently did. Many
> companies manage our data; most of them have no enforceable legal
> responsibility to us. There is lawyers' work to do there too.
>
>
>
> In the US, for example, we should end the immunity given to the
> telecommunications operators for assisting illegal listening. Immunity was
> extended by legislation in 2008. When he was running for president, Barack
> Obama said that he was going to filibuster that legislation. Then, in August
> 2008, when it became clear that he was going to become the next president,
> he changed his mind. Not only did he drop his threat to filibuster the
> legislation, he interrupted his campaigning in order to vote for immunity.
>
>
>
> We need not argue about whether immunity should have been extended. We
> should establish a date ? perhaps 21 January 2017 ? after which any
> telecommunications operator doing business in the US and facilitating
> illegal listening should be subject to ordinary civil liability. An
> interesting coalition between the human rights lawyers and commercial class
> action litigators would grow up immediately with very positive consequences.
>
>
>
> The people of the United States are not ready to abandon our role as a
> beacon of liberty to the world. We are not prepared to go instead into the
> business of spreading the procedures of totalitarianism
>
>
>
> If non-immunisation extended to non-US network operators that do business in
> the United States, such as Deutsche Telekom, it would have enormous positive
> consequences for citizens of other countries as well. In any country where
> de facto immunity presently exists and can be withdrawn, it should be
> lifted.
>
>
>
> The legal issues presented by the enormous pile of our data in other
> people's hands are well-known to all systems of law. The necessary
> principles are invoked every time you take your clothes to the cleaners.
> English-speaking lawyers refer to these principles as the law of "bailment".
> What they mean is, if you entrust people with your stuff, they have to take
> care of it as least as well as they take care of their own. If they fail,
> they are liable for their negligence.
>
>
>
> We need to apply the principle of trust in bailment, or whatever the local
> legal vocabulary is, to all that data we have entrusted to other people.
> This makes them legally responsible to us for the way they take care of it.
> There would be an enormous advantage in treating personal data under the
> rules of bailment or its equivalent.
>
>
>
> Such rules are governed by the law where the trust is made. If the dry
> cleaner chooses to move your clothes to another place where a fire breaks
> out, it doesn't matter where that fire happened: the relevant law is the law
> of the place where they took the clothes from you. The big data-mining
> companies play this game of lex loci server all the time: "Oh we are not
> really in country X, we're in California, that's where our computers are."
> This is a bad legal habit. We would not be doing them a grave disservice if
> we helped them out of it.
>
>
>
> Then there is lawyering to be done in international public law. We must hold
> governments responsible to one another for remedying current environmental
> devastation.
>
>
>
> The two most powerful governments in the world, the US and China, now
> fundamentally agree about their policy with respect to threats in the net.
> The basic principle is: "Anywhere in the net there is a threat to our
> national security, we're going to attack it."
>
>
>
> The US and the Soviet Union were in danger of poisoning the world in the
> 1950s through atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. To their credit, they
> were able to make a bilateral agreement prohibiting it.
>
>
>
> The US and the government of China could agree not to turn the human race
> into a free-fire zone for espionage. But they won't.
>
>
>
> In any country where de facto immunity presently exists and can be
> withdrawn, it should be lifted
>
>
>
> We must pursue legal and political redress for what has been done to us. But
> politics and law are too slow and too uncertain. Without technical solutions
> we are not going to succeed, just as there is no way to clean up the air and
> the water or positively affect global climate without technological change.
>
>
>
> Everywhere, businesses use software that secures their communications and
> much of that software is written by us. The "us" I mean here is those
> communities sharing free or open source software, with whom I have worked
> for decades.
>
>
>
> Protocols that implement secure communications used by businesses between
> themselves and with consumers (HTTPS, SSL, SSH, TLS, OpenVPN etc) have all
> been the target of the listeners' interference.
>
>
>
> Snowden has documented their efforts to break our cryptography.
>
>
>
> The US listeners are courting global financial disaster. If they ever
> succeed in compromising the fundamental technical methods by which
> businesses communicate securely, we would be one catastrophic failure away
> from global financial chaos. Their conduct will appear to the future to be
> as economically irresponsible as the debasing of the Roman coinage. It is a
> basic threat to the economic security of the world.
>
>
>
> The bad news is that they have made some progress towards irremediable
> catastrophe. First, they corrupted the science. They covertly affected the
> making of technical standards, weakening everyone's security everywhere in
> order to make their own stealing easier.
>
>
>
> Second, they have stolen keys, as only the best-financed thieves in the
> world can do. Everywhere encryption keys are baked into hardware, they have
> been at the bakery.
>
>
>
> At the beginning of September when Snowden's documents on this subject first
> became public, the shock waves reverberated around the industry. But the
> documents released also showed that the listeners are still compelled to
> steal keys instead of breaking our locks. They have not yet gained enough
> technical sophistication to break the fundamental cryptography holding the
> global economy together.
>
>
>
> Making public what crypto NSA can't break is the most inflammatory of
> Snowden's disclosures from the listeners' perspective. As long as nobody
> knows what the listeners cannot read, they have an aura of omniscience. Once
> it is known what they cannot read, everyone will use that crypto and soon
> they cannot read anything any more.
>
>
>
> Snowden has disclosed that their advances on our fundamental cryptography
> were good but not excellent. He is also showing us that we have very little
> time to improve our own cryptography. We must hurry to recover from the harm
> done to us by technical standards corruption. From now on, the communities
> that make free software crypto for everyone else must assume that they are
> up against "national means of intelligence". In this trade, that is bad news
> for developers, because that's the big leagues. When you play against their
> opposition, even the tiniest mistake is fatal.
>
>
>
> It's as though every factory in our society had an advanced fire safety
> system - while everybody's home had nothing
>
>
>
> Second, we must change the technical environment so it is safer for ordinary
> people and small businesses. This i |
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