By Rebecca Solnit
Dear Edward Snowden,
Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which
you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I’m sure, you.I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety -- if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life -- with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. “Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.I am moved by your choice of our future over yours, the world over yourself. You know what few do nowadays: that the self is not the same as self-interest. You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you’ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life. Which is to say, you have become a hero.
Pity the country that requires a hero, Bertolt Brecht once remarked,
but pity the heroes too. They are the other homeless, the people who
don’t fit in. They are the ones who see the hardest work and do it, and
pay the price we charge those who do what we can’t or won’t. If the old
stories were about heroes who saved us from others, modern heroes --
Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther
King, Aung San Suu Kyi -- endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our
own governments and systems of power.
The rest of us so often sacrifice that self and those ideals to fit
in, to be part of a cannibal system, a system that eats souls and
defiles truths and serves only power. Or we negotiate quietly to
maintain an uneasy distance from it and then go about our own business.
Though in my world quite a few of us strike our small blows against
empire, you, young man, you were situated where you could run a dagger
through the dragon’s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in
that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains
invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring
eye.
Private Eyes and Public Rights
Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies
violate in every way that’s profitable and expedient. Our lack of
privacy, their monstrous privacy -- even their invasion of our privacy
must, by law, remain classified -- is what you made visible. The agony
of a monster with nowhere to stand -- you are accused of spying on the
spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy -- is a
truly curious thing. And it is changing the world. Europe and South
America are in an uproar, and attempts to contain you and your damage
are putting out fire with gasoline.
You yourself said it so well on July 12th:
“A little over one
month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great
comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for,
seize, and read your communications. Anyone's communications at any
time. That is the power to change people's fates. It is also a serious
violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of
my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and
numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive,
pervasive surveillance. While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs
as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the
world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair.
These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice -- that it
must be seen to be done.”
They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies.
It’s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September
12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more
than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this
almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This
metadata -- the patterns and connections of communications rather than
their content -- is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson
pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular
movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those
moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better
future in the open world of the streets and squares.
The goal of gathering all this metadata, Chris speculates,
"is to be able to identify where the ‘hubs’ are, who the people are who
sit at key points in networks, helping pass news and messages along,
but especially, who the people are who spread ideas and information from
one network of people to the next, who help connect small networks into
larger ones, and thus facilitate the unpredictable and rapid spread of
dissent when it appears.”
Metadata can map the circulatory system of civil society, toward what
ends you can certainly imagine. When governments fear their people you
can be sure they are not serving their people. This has always been the
minefield of patriotism: loyalty to our government often means hostility
to our country and vice-versa. Edward Snowden, loyalist to country, you
have made this clear as day.
Those who demonize you show, as David Bromwich pointed out in a fine essay in the London Review of Books, their submission to the power you exposed. Who stood where, he writes,
“was an infallible
marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian.
What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the
way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian
acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure
who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has
condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those
of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment ‘he must be prosecuted’
obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.”
You said,
"I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know
the government will demonize me." Who you are is fascinating, but what
you’ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging
Washington’s relations with many Latin American and some European
countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people --
those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about
what they find there. “Edward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech
Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,” said a headline in Forbes. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.
What You Love
What’s striking about your words on video,
Edward Snowden, the ones I hear as your young, pale, thoughtful face
speaks with clarity and incisiveness in response to Glenn Greenwald’s
questions, is that you’re not talking much about what you hate, though
it’s clear that you hate the secret network you were part of. You hate
it because it poisons what you love. You told us,
"I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions... [but] I
will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and
irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are
revealed even for an instant." You love our world, our country -- not
its government, clearly, but its old ideals and living idealists, its
possibilities, its dreamers, and its dreams (not the stale, stuffed
American dream of individual affluence, but the other dreams of a better
world for all of us, a world of principle).
You told us where we now live and that you refuse to live there anymore:
"I don't want to
live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I
talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is
recorded. And that's not something I'm willing to support, it's not
something I'm willing to build, and it's not something I'm willing to
live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people
with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of
power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their
capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics."
Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new
surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability,
decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?
What is terrifying to the politicians at the top is that you may be
our truest patriot at the moment. Which makes all of them, with their
marble buildings and illustrious titles, their security details and all
the pomp, the flags, the saluting soldiers, so many traitors. The
government is the enemy of the people; the state is the enemy of the
country. I love that country, too. I fear that state and this new
information age as they spread and twine like a poison vine around
everything and everyone. You held up a mirror and fools hate the mirror
for it; they shoot the messenger, but the message has been delivered.
“This country is worth dying for,” you said in explanation of your
great risks. You were trained as a soldier, but a soldier’s courage with
a thinker’s independence of mind is a dangerous thing; a hero is a
dangerous thing. That’s why the U.S. military has made the Guardian, the British newspaper that has done the key reporting on your leaks, off limits
to our soldiers overseas. Whoever made that cynical censorship decision
understands that those soldiers may be defending a set of interests at
odds with this country and its Constitution, and they need to be kept in
the dark about that. The dark from which you emerged.
When the United States forced the airplane of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s
democratically elected head of state, to land in Austria, after
compliant France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy denied him the right to
travel through their airspace, all South America took it as an insult
and a violation of Bolivia’s sovereignty and international law. The
allied president of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, tracked the incident
in a series of tweets that demonstrated an openness, a principledness,
and a strong friendship between Morales, Ecuadoran president Rafael
Correa, and her. It was a little window onto a really foreign continent:
one in which countries are sometimes headed by genuinely popular
leaders who are genuinely transparent and governed by rule of law. It’s a
reminder that things in our own blighted, corrupted,
corporate-dominated country could be different.
Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century
How did we get here? In 1996, President Bill Clinton and Vice
President Al Gore pushed the dreadful slogan “building a bridge to the
twenty-first century.” It was a celebration of Silicon Valley-style
technological innovation and corporate globalization, among other
things. At the time, I put “building a bridge to the nineteenth century”
on my letterhead. It turned out that we were doing both at once:
erecting a massive electronic infrastructure that outpaces our ability
to democratically manage it and shifting our economy backward to
recreate the chasms of class divide that marked the nineteenth century.
The two goals intertwined like serpents making love.
The new technologies made a surveillance state that much more powerful and far-reaching; the new technologies replaced many jobs with few; the new technologies created new billionaires
without principles; the new technologies made us all into commodities
to be sold to advertisers; the new technologies turned our every move
into something that could be tracked; the new technologies kept us
distracted and busy. Meanwhile, almost everyone got poorer.
What the neoliberals amassing mountains of wealth for the already
super-wealthy forgot, what the tax-cutters and child-starvers never
learned in school, is that desperate people do not necessary simply lie
down and obey. Often enough, they rebel. There is no one as dangerous as
he or she who has nothing to lose. The twentieth century’s welfare
states, their pumped-up, plumped-up middle classes, their relative
egalitarianism and graduated tax plans pacified the once-insurrectionary
classes by meeting, at least in part, their needs and demands. The
comfortable don’t revolt much. Out of sheer greed, however, the
wealthiest and most powerful decided to make so many of the rest of us
at least increasingly uncomfortable and often far worse.
Edward Snowden, you rebelled because you were outraged; so many
others are rebelling because their lives are impossible now. These days
when we revolt, the new technologies become our friends as well as our
enemies. If you imagine those technologies as the fire Prometheus stole
from the gods, then it works both ways, for us and for them, to create
and to destroy.
Those new technologies are key to the latest rounds of global organizing, from the World Trade Organization actions
of 1999, put together by email and epochal in their impact, to the Arab
Spring, which used email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other
means, to Occupy Wall Street. The technologies are double-edged:
populist networks for creating global resistance are vulnerable to
surveillance; classified reams of data are breachable by information
saved to thumb drives or burned onto CDs by whistleblowers and hackers.
They can spy in private; we can organize in public, and maybe the two
actions are true opposites.
Meanwhile there is massive upheaval in Egypt and in Brazil, and in
recent years there have been popular rebellions in many parts of the
Arab world, Turkey, Iceland, Greece, Spain, Britain, Chile, and the U.S.
itself with Occupy. The globe is on fire with popular outrage, with
fury over economic injustice and, among other things, climate change
spurred by the profits a few are piling up
to the detriment of the rest of us, generations to come, other species,
and the planet itself. It seems that, surveillance or not, people are
not about to go quietly into the nineteenth century or accept the
devil’s bargains of the twenty-first either.
Prometheus and Being Burned
I think of a man even younger than you, Edward Snowden, who unlike you acted without knowing what he did: 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi,
whose December 2010 self-immolation to protest his humiliation and
hopelessness triggered what became the still-blooming, still-burning
Arab Spring. Sometimes one person changes the world. This should make
most of us hopeful and some of them fearful, because what I am also
saying is that we now live in a world of us and them, a binary world.
It’s not the old world of capitalism versus communism, but of the big
versus the little, of oligarchy versus democracy, of hierarchies versus
swarms, of corporations versus public interest and civil society.
It seems nearly worldwide now, which is why revolts all over the
planet have so much in common these days, why Occupy activists last
month held up signs in New York’s Liberty Plaza in solidarity with the
uprising in Taksim Square in Turkey; why Arab Spring activists phoned in
pizza orders
to the uprising in Wisconsin in early 2011; why Occupy spread around
the world, and Greek insurrectionaries learned from the successes of
Argentina in the face of austerity and economic collapse. We know our
fate is common and that we live it out together and change it together,
only together.
There were rumblings that you had defected, or would defect, to China
or Russia, but you had already defected when we became aware of your
existence: you had defected from them to us, using the power you had
gained deep within the bowels of their infernal machines to empower us.
What will we do with what you’ve taught us? That’s up to us, but for
anyone who thinks what you did was not threatening to those in power,
just look at how furious, how upset, how naked our emperors now are.
And you, Prometheus, you stole their fire, and you know it. You said,
"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can
give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like
him, [Senator Dianne] Feinstein, and [Congressman Peter] King, the
better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind
of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high
school."
Someday you may be regarded as a Mandela of sorts for the information
age, or perhaps a John Brown, someone who refused to fit in, to bow
down, to make a system work that shouldn’t work, that should explode.
And perhaps we’re watching it explode.
The match is sacrificed to start the fire. So maybe, Edward Snowden,
you’re a sacrifice. In the process, you’ve lit a bonfire out of their
secrecy and spying, a call to action.
I fear for you, but your gift gives us hope and your courage, an
example. Our loyalty should be to our ideals, because they are a threat
to the secret system you’ve exposed, because we have to choose between
the two. Right now you embody that threat, just as you embody those
ideals. For which I am grateful, for which everyone who is not embedded
in that system should be grateful.
Love,
Rebecca
Like Edward Snowden, Rebecca Solnit has a GED, not a high-school diploma. She lives in Silicon Valley’s shadow, in a city where billionaires race $10 million yachts and austerity is closing the community college.
source: tomdispatch
We owe a lot to Edward Snowden. At the moment the impact of what he
has done remains unclear as the shockwaves from Prism, the biggest
whistleblowing case in US history, echo around the world, but it will
become evident over the weeks and months to come. It makes Watergate
look like some stolen office pens. What kind of person does it take to
do something that explosive, to risk losing his life and liberty? He has
said he believes it is unlikely that he will ever see home again. He
has left behind a large salary, comfortable home, girlfriend and family
for an uncertain future.
Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the national intelligence committee,
has branded Snowden a traitor - but it is precisely the opposite which
often motivates whistleblowers, a sense of moral obligation larger than
self-preservation, and a patriotism (either for one's country or
organisation) that propels them to challenge groupthink. Whistleblowing
of the sort that Snowden has done is selflessness on a level that most
of us would not consider - often with risks of losing life, liberty,
friends and employment dependent on the scale of the whistleblow. He has
sacrificed himself for the truth about the NSA and the government to be
exposed. "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal
pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love
are revealed even for an instant" he said in a note supplied with the
original leaked documents.
Whistleblowing takes astounding courage and strength of character.
Whistleblowers face demonisation from the government, smear campaigns in
the media, losing family and friends and attempts to silence them one
way or another. Snowden, in his interview with the Guardian, describes
the possibility of being bundled into a US bound plane, people coming
after him, or paying off the triads to have him taken care of. He,
presumably, knows far better than most of us how distinct a possibility
this is, and it may be partly why he has taken pains not to remain
anonymous - it will be difficult to dispose of a person the whole world
is watching. Despite this, he says he is not afraid, except for his
family.
Edward Snowden abandoned his life, job, family and country for the
truth, and he has done this for us. We owe him a debt of gratitude for
such an act of great courage and selflessness, and we owe him our
justified anger against those who have breached our trust. For this is a
tremendous breach of our trust - and although Obama claimed on Friday:
"You can't have 100% security and then also have 100% privacy and zero
inconvenience", this stands against the principle of the Constitution
and the spirit of the founding fathers. American Independence was a
originally rejection of government interference - albeit of the
parliament of Great Britain to rule them without representation. The
Declaration of Independence cites the right of everyone to "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness". This liberty has been violated by
the intrusion of the NSA and the Obama administration.
Make no mistake; the treachery Feinstein refers to was not by
Snowden, who in the ultimate act of patriotism has sacrificed the
liberty held in such esteem by the founding fathers for the country he
loves and the ideals it stands for, but instead by the NSA and the Obama
Administration. In the UK we are fortunate that an Orwellian state is
not in the advanced stages it is in the US, but as we have seen often
what begins there follows elsewhere. We owe him our gratitude, and if
the tide of secrecy begins to turn, our liberty and our privacy.
The last words Edward Snowden spoke in his week of interviews with
the Guardian were from Benjamin Franklin: "Those who surrender freedom
for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
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