A brave new world of espionage

A brave new world of espionage

S P SETH

George Orwell’s novel, 1984, imagined a surveillance state where Big Brother was watching everything that its citizens did and nobody could escape its prying eyes. This is just a very broad outline of a very complex story. Orwell wrote his novel in 1948, presumably as a cautionary tale about what could happen in future with too much concentration of power in Big Brother (the ruler) and his small state apparatus. In this state, all the citizens lived in a state of fear and terror.

Since then 1984 has come and gone. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, where there were stories of a powerful Party and ruling apparatus snooping on citizens, made George Orwell’s account chillingly scary but hopefully a thing of the past. Until that is the American whistle blower Edward Snowden leaked the details of a vast US operation of data-mining its citizens’ and foreigners’ alike from tapping phone, internet and social media sites to apprehend terrorists and their contacts, or anyone or everyone suspected of such activities.

The 29-year old Snowden was at the time working for a private contractor at a US National Security Agency (NSA) facility in Hawaii. And like Bradley Manning, who is facing trial for leaking huge amount of classified information to the WikiLeaks, was haunted by the breadth and scope of what he was handling affecting the private lives of millions of his compatriots and foreigners at the whim of a new Big Brother that might even be potentially more dangerous than his 1984 Orwellian counterpart, with its omnipotent electronic eyes. Snowden’s conscience was outraged, leading him to spill the beans on his government’s hacking of people’s private communications at home and abroad.

As Snowden reportedly said, “ I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.” And he added that he couldn’t “in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” He escaped to Hong Kong, which let him fly to Moscow where he is stranded in transit until some other country agrees to grant him asylum. Both Hong Kong/China and Russia have refused US request for his extradition. Here in lies the plot of a John le Carre’ spy novel. But that is a different aspect.

In the meantime, in the US they are baying for his blood, so to speak. The reaction of the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, summed it up. He said, “For me, it is literally--- not figuratively—literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities.” The sad thing is that, apart from sanitizing the nature and scope of such surveillance, the US authorities haven’t made even a gesture of saying sorry to its own citizens and the foreigners under its sweep. Indeed, President Obama reportedly commented that there was no such thing as hundred percent security and hundred percent privacy; hence justifying this huge espionage operation on anyone and everyone.

The US authorities justify it in the name of combating terrorism. When questioned by German reporters on a recent trip there, Obama said that such surveillance had prevented at least 50 terrorist attacks, including in Germany. That might or might not be true. The most worrying aspect is that in doing this; the US is spying on everyone. In the process, the US state would have stored information on almost all of its citizens and many foreigners, with potential for great harm if and when it decided to go after them for whatever reasons. One only has to recall the McCarthyism witch-hunt in the US in the fifties, when so many lives were destroyed because people were suspected of being communists and/or harboring communist sympathies on heresy.

And this is all happening under Obama, the President who was seen by many in the United States and the world as a breath of fresh air after the disastrous Bush presidency. This mega spying of the US people started with the Bush regime’s Patriot Act when the war on terror was supposed to justify all sorts of curbs on people’s freedoms, with the use of widespread wiretapping and other surveillance tools. Since then such snooping has expanded to spy on people’s internet information and what they are saying and talking on social media sites.

 With much of the world depending on US companies like Google, AOL, Yahoo for internet services, and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Skype, and these corporations being obliged to provide data when sought by the US government agencies for people at home and abroad; it is quite understandable that the people in the European Union, even Canada, are upset about it and asking questions about the privacy of their citizens and the extent of such encroachment. It is ironic that the war on terrorism that, among other things, was supposed to protect western way of life and its freedoms is turning the United States into a society where its citizens have their privacy and freedoms encroached upon by their own democratic government.

When the terrorists hit New York Trade Centre on 9/11, they were seeking to create panic in the US’s economic heartland. Osama bin Laden-inspired jihadists had no armies to fight the world’s most-powerful country. They had an ideology of hate against the west with a long list of grievances that they believed would start a jihad against the United States among Muslims in the world. They partly succeeded but Muslims, like any people in the world, are not a homogenous entity. Like Christian countries, they have their own contradictions and conflicts. If religion were super glue, the Middle East will not be the volatile region today as all the countries there, except Israel, are Muslims.

The enactment of the Patriot Act in October 2001 started a process of spying on people’s privacy by tapping their phones and other intrusive measures. Which, as Snowden has revealed, has now become a hydra-headed monster spying on people through internet, social media sites and whatever. In the process, the United States’ high moral ground on human rights and as a practitioner and promoter of democracy elsewhere in the world has been seriously compromised. This was happening for a decade or more, after the war on global terror, but Snowdon’s revelations have given a sense of the extent of worldwide snooping that the US has been engaged in.

The US, of course, is trying to put the best spin on its surveillance activities as designed to prevent terrorist attacks. But as Bill Keller, New York Times columnist recently wrote in his column, “ I don’t think we’re on a slippery slope to a police state, but I think if we are too complacent about our civil liberties we could wake up one day and find them gone….”

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au