Le Mal est dans la chose même et le remède est violent. Il faut porter la cognée à la racine.
The solution to evil is violent. We must take the hatchet to the root.
Jean-Paul Marat
The heads of the National Security Agency, NSA, and our somewhat derivative equivalent in Britain, General Communications HQ or GCHQ, still say NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of excessive spying by our governments on their own people put “our” much-loved spies and heroes at risk all around the world. These men behind the curtain won’t say how, but they insist the leaks are a threat to our (or rather their) security.
Above: cryptic trailer of the latest Bond movie. Little can be told about its content yet, other than that it features the return of the villainous SPECTRE criminal organization as the main antagonist.
My first rebuttal to this crazy idea that some kind of James Bond is out there saving the day, and he is now at increased risk because of the “arrogant” whistleblowers revealing state secrets, is simple: Who cares? They still have their secrecy, so they aren’t going to be missed. It is a bit arbitrary to insist on a curtain of secrecy behind which they can sacrifice lives for freedom and democracy, while they aren’t willing to sacrifice for transparency – something supported by the overwhelming majority of the public. It sounds like they’re afraid of the costs of true freedom and democracy, in which case they aren’t exactly the tough guys they try to look like via these movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Argo or the better-known 007 movies. It would be more accurate to call them manipulators and liars.
The point is, we are led to believe in a fictitious picture of the world of espionage by movies like the 007 movie, Skyfall, which even depicted a leaker with curiously bleached blonde hair *cough* Julian A. *cough* as the latest, high-tech incarnation of the supervillain. But if GCHQ is full of such tough guys and heroes as Mr Bond, why are they desperately afraid of the truth, or of any engagement with the public? Would heroes really be scared of being tempered or overseen in any way by the public they claim to protect? Would they be willing to thwart democracy in order to save it, or go cloak-and-dagger in the name of the liberal virtues of openness, democracy and justice? What kind of hero would claim to have a mandate from the crowd, but turn their weapons against the same crowd for information-gathering, target practice or human shields as soon as they deem it “necessary”?
We’ve all heard of the “hornet’s nest” analogy, and some people might think Snowden kicked a hornet’s nest – that what he did was irresponsible, even disastrous for the intelligence community and their efforts to “keep us safe”. He did a lot of damage. Or did he?
Well, even if you grant them their entire argument and conclude that Snowden did cause a lot of damage, there’s another way of looking at it. If you found an idiot with his head embedded in the hornet’s nest of the Middle East, like the NSA and GCHQ have done to themselves, wouldn’t you also feel an urge to kick them up the backside like they deserve? What Snowden has done, or has been alleged to have done by his most exaggerated critics, is a lot like that. How can Snowden be blamed for other people maintaining mass spying operations with such elusive and complicated justifications that the public can’t be trusted to know anything about them? Even if Snowden’s actions were to culminate in disaster, thousands of dead spies embedded around the world by the US and UK, it would be their own fault, and they’d deserve what is coming to them. They don’t get to blame the guy who drew attention to their idiocy, as if he somehow made them idiots by pointing out what they’re doing.
In my opinion, it should not be disavowed, but hoped that Snowden’s actions and other whistleblowing such as WikiLeaks’ activity has endangered the lives and complicated the efforts of the guys at GCHQ and NSA. If they won’t take it from us, let every dagger in their backs be a lesson against their attempts to get solace by cloaking themselves from public scrutiny. Why should they get any public sympathy for their trouble, if they aren’t even going to explain themselves? After all, history shows us how the heads who won’t take a message from the public eventually take it from a bullet. That lesson is the sole reason why we uphold democratic ideals at all.
For all the grandiose military and intelligence chiefs, prime ministers and presidents who condemned Edward Snowden or the public -serving actions of journalists through the help of WikiLeaks, I have this question: Who are you, a bunch of idiots who start pointless wars and lead our soldiers to empty deaths in the sands, to lecture Edward Snowden about the sanctity of life or importance of national security?
It is ironic that the rulers who justify wasting the lives of soldiers for “freedom” in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are incapable of understanding the costs of true freedom, insisting that it isn’t worth putting our lives at risk to know the truth about mass surveillance – but the same rulers think it is worth putting our lives at risk for wacky plans to replace the regimes in Iraq, Syria and Iran and slaughter thousands of people. What’s more worth sacrificing for? The freedom to enjoy true democracy and hold our rulers accountable through revelations about their abuses, or some wacky plan to eliminate the leaders of Syria and Iran to plunder those regimes’ oil reserves? It’s quite obvious.
The United States and Britain are apparently governed by charlatans. Their curtain of national security is illegitimate, and must be ripped down at all costs. Even an earthworm would have more discipline to manage our national security in a capable way.
It so happens that Edward Snowden is a hero, and that no-one was better positioned to blow the whistle on the outrageous government abuse of technology against the public than him. But even if the abuse had been exposed by a young child, or if a rat had somehow gnawed the cable and thereby revealed these abuses against the public, the exposure of the truth would still have been both charitable and necessary for the public good, and well-worth any blowback that might be foreseen.
Read my most recent deep political analysis, “The Use of Republican War Hawks”, at ClubOfINFO, and keep a look out for my next major contribution to world opinion at Press TV.
For my more optimistic analysis of technology and my theories on the way technology can be directed and guided for the sake of positive social change, get my book, Unlocked: Emerging Technology Promises.
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