Last Resort for Confronting 'Electronic Big Brother' (Le Temps,
Switzerland)
"Barack Obama's explanations (Internet espionage is not
about Americans, and is carefully controlled) do nothing to reassure those living
outside the United States, unaware of how Washington will leash the monster it
has spawned. ... Fortunately, this Leviathan also has an Achilles heel: the
individual. ... Their existence is, for now, the best guarantee that the nightmare
of Electronic Big Brother will not materialize."
Private First Class Bradley Manning, the person behind the WikiLeaks disclosures of decades of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. His status as an American her, along with one-time CIA technician Edward Snowden, may be in dispute, but not his place in history.
An individual
act of disclosure becomes the last resort for confronting the nightmare of electronic
Big Brother.
The
Swiss secret services, ridiculed last year for allowing a computer technician
to steal terabytes of data, must be smiling over the mishap that has struck
their U.S. counterparts. By unveiling the NSA's program
of Internet surveillance, Edward Snowden has eclipsed Bradley Manning, the
soldier-analyst at the heart of the revelations of WikiLeaks. The two men have
a lot in common: young and idealistic - Edward Snowden is "libertarian,"
they both appear to have discovered with dismay, what their government has authorized
in the name of national security. The question that they raise is the same: are
they heroes, or traitors?
Posted By Worldmeets.US
In
the Snowden case, the United States has become a victim of a surveillance apparatus
that has proliferated since September 11, 2001. Tens of thousands of
intelligence specialists have been recruited, secret sites have proliferated, and
the stove piping that separated the services has given way to the emergence of a
huge network of sensitive information - and with a consequently greater risk of
leakage.
The
nature of intelligence gathering has changed. It is no longer limited to the
acquisition of targeted data. Now, by means of the Internet and the digitization
of the most trivial facts and gestures, it involves the automated collection of
huge amounts of information about people's lives. The question of monitoring
these activities suggests the need for some new terms. Barack Obama's
explanations (Internet espionage is not about Americans, and is carefully
controlled) do nothing to reassure those living outside the United States, unaware
of how Washington will leash the monster it has spawned.
Fortunately,
this Leviathan also has an
Achilles heel: the individual. People like Manning or Snowden, who said, in the
jaded words of a disillusioned intelligence specialist, "feel empowered to
make a moral judgment on the conduct of the state for which he works," and
that "there will be more and more of these types of cases." Their
existence is, for now, the best guarantee that the nightmare of Electronic Big
Brother will not materialize.
