Spying on citizens

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By: Juana Luck

The highly awarded documentary Citizenfour from director Laura Poitras is based on the uncovering of the NSA spying scandal. Its counterpart, written by journalist Glen Greenwald, is a book called No Place To Hide and delves deep into the story of Edward Snowden and its repercussions of the NSA surveillance state. In June 2013, Poitras and Greenwald worked together with Snowden to publish his story.

Reading No Place To Hide was a steady learning curve for me, and I highly recommended it to anyone who is even slightly interested in personal freedom and rights. While I reflected over Greenwald's arguments, I played the devil's advocate and tried to find reasons for all the invasiveness and deception the people of the U.S. and the world are subjected to.

Countries have arguably always been in competition with each other in order to protect themselves from other nations or to secure resources and space. Therefore, it could be argued that it is only natural for a country to strive for advancement in order to protect themselves against nations who may not be peaceful. The U.S. has vast resources and advanced technology available to them, so it makes sense for them to use these to their advantage.

It also makes sense to keep this information undisclosed to the public so that the NSA can gain the most insight into criminals’ plans through open channels of communication. Terrorist attacks can be prevented, or at least considerably slowed down, by policing “intelligent communication,” such as internet and telephone communication.

Canadian thinker Harold Innis explored the notion of the effects of communication technology on a society. The internet, besides making us stupid as some academics like Nicholas Carr have argued, has other effects on a civilization with its promise of almost instant and free communication for a large segment of the world. With this tremendous change brought upon us through the dawn of Web 2.0, I can honestly say that I am unsure what exactly the repercussions would be, whether positive or negative.

However, the importance of law and order is obvious. The internet being policed makes as much sense to me as Hamilton possessing a police station. So theoretically, I am not opposed to someone keeping watch over intelligent communication.

Problems with this arise, of course, when this power to police is abused. While optimistic at the beginning of reading Glen Greenwald's account of the story, I soon understood that the NSA was not using their powers solely to keep terrorist attacks from happening. Instead, they used their spying abilities to gain economic, diplomatic, “and an all-purpose global advantage.” Greenwald's mention of operation “SIGINT” exemplifies this, as it elaborates on the spying on U.N. Permanent Representatives to find out about their personal positions regarding a “vote on sanctions against Iran,” thus gaining diplomatic advantage.

All these things aside, the biggest problem for me arose once the book explained that the U.S. government used their extensive surveillance system to maintain the status quo. Many people are indifferent to intelligent communication surveillance because they know their life is somewhat boring and insignificant to the NSA since they “don't do anything wrong.”

However, what needs to be considered is how the people in power define wrongdoing. According to Greenwald, a “state will view any challenge to its powers as wrongdoing” and it goes beyond illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Greenwald himself was considered a terrorist since his reporting on the Snowden files led to a public uproar and had an irreversible effect on the U.S. government. “The true measure of a society's freedom,” Greenwald claims, “is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.” As Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, said: “the NSA is very much reminiscent of the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany.”

As studies have shown, government surveillance has psychological effects on people and inhibits their freedom of speech. Through the uncovering of the Snowden files, the U.S. now exists in the next phase of the surveillance state, in which the surveillance is overt and citizens know that their intelligent communication is being observed. The fact that the filmmaker of Citizenfour, Laura Poitras, edited the film in Berlin because she was afraid the U.S. government would seize her source material proves that the government is obstructing rights to freedom of speech when they collide with their own agenda and pose a threat to their power.

It is important to not adopt a position of indifference. By supporting companies and software that do not hand over your private information to the NSA, you are indirectly voting for people's rights to privacy. The boycott of Skype, Google, Yahoo and Facebook would send a powerful message to these companies saying that people value their rights, do not want to be surveyed and will take active measures to protect their freedoms.

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