Everybody who is not in a coma, must be aware of the big noises being made about both the NSA‘s invasion of privacy and the nation’s need for air-tight security. The far left is screaming that we are turning the country into a totalitarian state in which no one will have any privacy and in which the government will know everything about everybody, while the far right screams just as loadly that we are giving up our freedom to our enemies because we are not doing enough to ensure safety from terrorist attacks.
All this screaming, all these attacks across the aisle, are being made, mostly by people who have little or no real knowledge of what is actually going on between our intelligence agencies and the Internet because if they did, they wouldn’t be just screaming, they’d be jumping out windows.
What it’s all proving is that some parts of the brain are much stronger and much more controlling that others. Our capabilities in computer science have advanced much more swiftly than our cognitive abilities have been able to comprehend what to do with them and how to control them. Meanwhile, our military and intelligence arms are very busy trying to tell us that there is no acknowledged level of control that is necessary for us to have, over our technical capabilities, because they’ve got our backs. Sure they do and that’s the problem. I am the most optimistic of people but I can see no end to this unrestricted technological freedom but an apocalypse.
I say this, acknowledging that I have always been a firm believer in scientific research, a backer of education, and the need for scientific knowledge and exploration, but I also say it with a firm knowledge that this country, that often (falsely) projects itself as a moral Christian land, is still the only nation in the world that has exploded a nuclear bomb in anger and still the only nation in the world that has made the first destructive step in cyber warfare.
I refer, of course, to the Stuxnet virus which it is now acknowledged, even by our government, to have been used to destroy Iran’s nuclear fuel making technology.
That’s bad, but even worse is the fact that we now have available to not just the government, but to almost any sophisticated entity, cyber information and technology that goes so far beyond anything imaginable to the average person as to make said technology capable of conquering the world and subjecting all people on earth to it. This is a terrifying thought because there is no evidence available that there is any human intelligence or morality capable of dealing with such power.
If one finds oneself even marginally involved in the cyber world it becomes clear that there are forces and technologies that are so far beyond our ability to understand their capabilities that they have left all law and government rule in the dust. The arguments I have heard from the technocrats are that this kind of super tech world levels the field, that it places the average person on a par with the huge and powerful governments that here-to-fore have dominated them. These arguments are ridiculous. This logic, though attractive, is completely false because as strong as a group like Anonymous, the freelance hacker geniuses appears, there are just as many geniuses working for the government, all the governments, and there is really no one creating any enforceable rules that are specific to this chaotic emerging world.
Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown are two men who understand the threats posed by this new world and have tried to do something about it. Snowden, the computer nerd, by exposing what the organizations for which he worked are doing to invade citizens privacy and thereby threaten their freedoms and Brown the super hacker by taking over great portions of the Internet to inform huge segments of usership about how they are being manipulated by both governments and private security firms.
For their efforts, Snowden is currently a fugitive from the United States government and Brown is being held without bail on charges that could leave him in jail for 105 years. The message here is, don’t upset the Feds, they may not have a clue as to what they are doing but they are experts in vindictive.
Snowden’s basic offense has been to inform the American public that the NSA is carrying out a legal program that is stealing their privacy and their lives, this in contravention to most of the Constitution but not of the Patriot Act, a panic induced bit of legislation put together in haste and cowardly induced fear immediately after 9/11. That nothing, which would help, an already informed enemy was revealed, seems not to have penetrated the corporate media’s limited mentality. That the point of the revelation, which was to make Americans aware, that their freedoms were being eroded, seems to matter not. That the need for an informed investigation into NSA’s information trolling has been one of the results is, according to the authorities, of no significance. All that seems to matter to the government is that a whistleblower has revealed information that they didn’t, for only their own reasons, want revealed. Why didn’t they want it revealed, because it will interfere with their search for omnipotence. It’s all about power, people. It’s about insignificant bureaucrats wanting to feel bigger than you.
Brown used information he got from Anonymous, to report on the operations of private intelligence firms. Many of these companies were military intelligence contractors. One, HBGary Federal was attempting to tarnish the reputation of WikiLeaks.
Brown has been in jail for 300 days already, chased down by the FBI for among other things creating PM, which was dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in secret in cyber-security, intelligence and surveillance. He appeared in We Are Legion, a documentary, explaining the importance of information obtained by hackers.
Too much of what our government does and way too much of what so called government contractors do is wrapped in a self-imposed veil of super secret obfuscation. The more opportunity that our intelligence & security organizations have to hide what they are doing from the public, the more occasion there is for things to be done wrong. Of course the government and their contractors claim that they are guided by rules imposed by congress and themselves, but so far I haven’t been able to discover one congressmen who has any knowledge of those rules and that leaves self restriction and anyone who is restricted only by themselves is in actuality completely unrestricted and any fool who believes otherwise deserves to lose his freedom.
Business doesn’t want whistleblowers. The government doesn’t want whistleblowers, nobody wants their craven secrets revealed, but we the people definitely benefit when the organizations that are supposed to be working for our well being, but are actually acting to curtail our constitutional freedoms are revealed to be the enemies of democracy that they are. The Constitution specifically protected freedom of the press because the founders understood that any group is susceptible to malfeasance when it is allowed to police itself, and that no group is really able to police itself.
Professor Yochai Benklar explained this brilliantly in his testimony at Bradley Manning’s trail, when he explained that freedom of the Press is anchored in our constitution, because it reflects our fundamental belief that no institution can be its own watchdog. The government is well intentioned and full of various checks and balances but like all big organizations the various branches of government contain people who aren’t purely selfless and whose motives aren’t always benign. History and experience tell us that secrecy is often necessary and justified but they are often used to cover up dishonesty, avarice or just plain incompetence, and for that reason we need watchdogs that are not connected to the establishment but whose only loyalty is to the citizens of the United States.
Such men are Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, Julien Assange, Daniel Ellsberg and Barrett Brown and such men must be protected, if we wish democracy and justice to triumph.