America's 'Undemocratic' Surveillance is More Invasive than China's (Epoca, Brazil)
"E-mails from none other than President DilmaRousseff may have been read by the American intelligence
services, as part of a gigantic operation that makes interference with computer
networks by the Chinese state seem like a harmless joke. Drawing from news
reports that have by now spanned the globe, the control exerted by the American
government - not just in the United States but on every continent - seems larger,
more powerful, and more invasive. ... A world in which we have no right to privacy
is not a free world."
Every one of us
is subject to the snooping of the American government. The worst part is that
we don't know how.
Until
recently, the villains of espionage and invasions of privacy were authoritarian
governments in countries like China or North Korea - and not without reason. In
such places, the state isn't known for pressing respect of citizen privacy. They
unceremoniously open drawers, run over family memories, and trample on the personal
secrets of people who cannot defend themselves, all in the name of protecting
the interests of the fatherland, socialism, or whatever.
In
2006, a German film directed by FlorianHenckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others, flung open the
nightmare of how the Stasi, East Germany's Cold War secret police, bugged
apartments on a whim, under any pretext, and spied on ordinary people while
they took baths, read the newspaper, or made love. The Lives of Others (Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2007) shocked audiences
with its meticulous and terrifying profile of a state that could do anything it
wanted against its silenced citizens. From this modest work of art, and from factual
reports that today are amply proven by history, we learned a lesson we have no
right to ever forget: what separates a democracy from a totalitarian regime is
transparency.
In
a democracy, the law requires private life to be impenetrable, and requires the
state to be transparent. In totalitarian regimes, the government is opaque,
does what it wants, and is above the law. It can chew people's intimacy like a
horse in a pasture chews grass. In a democracy, we, the citizens, have the
right to our intimate secrets in the same way that we have the right to know
every detail about our public administration. In totalitarianism, the opposite
occurs: state officials can hide whatever they want from the public, in
addition to having the tools to penetrate the privacy of whoever they like. The
obvious conclusion: there is more democracy where the state is most transparent,
and where privacy is the most respected; and the more authoritarian the state,
the more opaque it is and the more likely citizens are helpless to protect
their personal information from the authorities.
Until,
in effect, the other day, situations of government savagery like those in the
film The Lives of Others only
occurred in countries under dictatorship. Democracies, or alleged democracies,
were safe from this type of perversion, because they ensured free expression
and the right to privacy. When the Internet came along, it was hailed by many
as a genuinely democratic invention - a technology that dictatorships could
never control. The Internet was, then, the perfect marriage of cutting edge
technology and the most advanced democracy. One was the realization of the
other.
Just
recently, in April of this year, The
Economist, in a report on the Internet in China, recalled a phrase uttered
by Bill Clinton when he was still president of the United States. Asked about
the possibility that the Chinese government would closely monitor Internet communications,
he said: "That would be like nailing jello to the
wall." With his witty, light, and easy style, Clinton prophesied that the Internet
couldn't be administered by the claws of the state, summing up the view of the
alleged "free world" on "closed societies" - a superior,
confident and slightly ironic perspective.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
This
was all quite recent. Today, the landscape has been turned upside down. TV Globo'sFantástico
revealed that e-mails from none other than President DilmaRousseff may have been read by the American intelligence
services, as part of a gigantic operation that makes interference with computer
networks by the Chinese state seem like a harmless joke (by the way, contrary
to Clinton's prediction, China monitors the flow of information on the Web reasonably
well). Drawing from news reports that have by now spanned the globe, the
control exerted by the American government - not just in the United States but
on every continent - seems larger, more powerful, and more invasive. And pay
attention: it isn't only the president of Brazil suffering under this form of
violent invasion. Each of us is subject to similar snooping. The worst part is
that we don't know how this is done, since the opaque American government doesn't
say.
A
world in which we have no right to privacy is not a free world. A so-called
democratic government that uses the Internet to invade privacy, well … we didn't
have one until, in effect, the other day.
