by Robert Manne
Snowden knew by now that no internal NSA channels were available to him. On many occasions in 2012 he had brought what he regarded as abuses to the attention of colleagues, either “laterally” to fellow workers or “vertically” to his superiors. Fellow workers might have been disquieted, but did nothing. They advised him not to “rock the boat”. Superiors warned him not to put anything in writing. Everyone, in short, regarded the abuses as someone else’s problem. This was hardly surprising. The abuses were not at the margins but at the heart of the system. Snowden was aware that recent federal whistleblower legislation afforded him no protection, both because the legislation exempted intelligence workers and because he was a contract employee rather than a public servant.
Snowden was also vividly aware of what had happened to previous NSA whistleblowers, like William Binney and Thomas Drake, whose lives had been ruined after their efforts to bring NSA abuses to public attention, by brutal FBI raids and criminal charges. From their experiences he had learned two lessons: that defection was unavoidable if he was to be effective, and that he needed to prove his case with solid documentary evidence. Challenged time and again by his enemies to return to the United States and to face the legal music, Snowden has responded in two main ways. He has pointed out that, under the Espionage Act of 1917, he would not be able to make a public-interest defence. Even the exculpatory evidence he would like to bring forward would be ruled inadmissible on state secrecy grounds. More importantly, he argued that there were times when the moral course of action was not legal. Warning about the dangers of suspicionless state surveillance on the basis of documentary evidence was such a case. This dilemma led him to propose an original idea: the creation of a new international court that could judge those cases where individuals had been driven to break their nation’s laws in pursuit of some generally acknowledged global good.
Snowden had decided to become a whistleblower in part because he was a democrat. He was certain that the NSA’s secret programs of suspicionless mass surveillance would never have survived public scrutiny. The characteristic phrase he used to express the democratic content of his thought and his democratic ambition was his desire to see the people resume their “seat at the table of government”. He did not think it necessary for the public to understand intelligence programs or targets in specific detail, only “the broad outlines of the authorities that the government have granted themselves”. Snowden believed in the importance of the work of intelligence. Indeed, he thought his whistleblowing was in the long-term interests of the US security agencies, which he insisted he was still serving. However, he believed “the priorities of any secret service are subordinate to the priorities of a free society”. He was not a revolutionary. He did not want to “destroy” government, only to “improve” it.
He had also decided to become a whistleblower because he was a patriot. He had done what he had done as a matter of conscience. For him, the United States was not just a country but what he called “an ideal”. His defection, he insisted, had not made him stateless but even more an American than he had been before. There were some things “worth dying for and I think the country is one of them”. The behaviour he had observed at the NSA, he said to the Council of Europe in a telling phrase, was “beneath the United States”.
Snowden was clearly exercised by the principal argument of his enemies, some of whom called for his execution, that by his actions he had gravely damaged for years or decades the capacity of the intelligence services, aided the terrorist enemy, and exposed the citizens of the country he loved to extraordinary and unnecessary risk. He answered this charge carefully. In his estimation there was surprisingly little security value in the mass surveillance programs. The independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board of Congress had reached the conclusion that the collection of telephone metadata under section 215 of the Patriot Act had not prevented even one terrorist act. Court records showed that in the chief success story the NSA claimed for section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act – concerning a New York subway bombing plot – the role dragnet surveillance had played in its discovery was greatly exaggerated.
Snowden was also aware of the studies that had shown how overblown the threat of terrorist attack had become in the imagination of Americans since the atrocity of September 11. Even if September 11 were included, the chance of an American dying in a terrorist attack in any year since 1970 was one in 3.5 million. The threat of death following a bathtub fall was greater. Even if in theory the terrorists might learn something about the NSA’s surveillance methods from Snowden’s revelations, most in practice were unlikely to benefit. They were generally alienated and ill-educated. And if they now felt “caged” and unable to communicate, through greater awareness of the NSA’s capabilities, Americans would if anything be safer. Most deeply, however, Snowden argued that even if it were true that the risk of a successful terrorist attack would increase “by some percentage” without mass dragnet surveillance, the programs were nonetheless indefensible. They ought to be rejected for the same reason that torture is rejected, “because it is barbaric, because it is immoral, it is contrary to our basic principles as a civilization”.
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Those who have come to know Edward Snowden, or even to observe his behaviour at a distance, invariably describe him as modest and reticent. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who had once described Snowden as a “narcissist” before knowing anything about him, later admitted that he was entirely wrong. One of the more attractive features of Snowden’s character, despite the audacity and gravity of his actions, is his capacity to admit self-doubt: “I’m a human being, I could make mistakes … I could make the wrong call.” Nonetheless, no one could sacrifice their life to a cause in the way Snowden has done without a grand animating passion. In Hong Kong, Snowden told Glenn Greenwald that as a young man he had been influenced by Joseph Campbell’s study of heroic archetypes in mythology and history, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He believed individuals had a duty to act in defence of their principles. He believed such individuals might spark great social movements and therefore affect the course of history.
Snowden sacrificed his life of comfort for two great, interrelated causes. One was opposition to the global rise of the mass-surveillance security state, whose foundations he had witnessed inside the NSA and whose technical capacities were certain to grow “by orders of magnitude” every year. The technology it had developed represented “the most significant new threat to civil rights in modern times”. He did not believe the United States “was uniquely at fault”. He did, however, believe that the NSA – “the most capable actor” in the field because it was “the most well-funded” – had become a global laboratory in which a dystopian human future could be discerned. The trajectory of history was imitation of the practices of the most advanced societies by the less advanced. Unless the American mass-surveillance security state was resisted and dismantled, it would become the model for other states. As he put it: “If we allow the NSA to continue unrestrained, every other government will accept this as the green light to do the same.” If anything, he was more concerned about what authoritarian or totalitarian governments might do with the surveillance capacities pioneered in the United States than he was about the future of his own society. To avoid such a future, Snowden saw only two exits. One was the creation of “new international norms” of behaviour, perhaps through the negotiation of a new international “convention on the prevention of mass surveillance”, before it was too late. As a realist, Snowden was not convinced that this would be successful. The less ambitious alternative was the preservation of liberty and privacy through the decision of individuals to employ systems of encryption in all their transactions with others that states, no matter how powerful, would be unable to crack. As Snowden has never tired of telling his audiences, “Encryption works.”
The other great cause for Snowden was the integrity of the internet, on which he believed the NSA had declared war. It was appalling to him that i
t had “intercepted and scrutinized and analysed … our private homes, our private beds, our private feelings and thoughts”. In Hong Kong, Snowden told Greenwald that he had come to know who he was through roaming the vast resources the internet made available. “Basically, the internet allowed me to experience freedom and explore my full capacity as a human being.” In this he knew he was not alone. Snowden saw himself as a representative of the “generation that had grown up with the internet”. For them it was a means of what he called “self-actualisation”. He called upon his generation to join him in the struggle to take back the freedom of the internet from the NSA. Snowden had given up his comfortable life, then, to the defence of two countries and two ideals – the United States and the internet – one actual and one virtual.
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I do not want to suggest that aspects of Snowden’s case about the NSA and suspicionless mass surveillance – and even more the case made by some of his more radical supporters – are not open to question. Even if everything Snowden has argued about the secrecy and subservience to government of the FISA court is true, it is still the only such foreign intelligence court in the world. As Snowden himself acknowledges, government oversight of the UK’s GCHQ is “light” compared to US oversight of the NSA.
Nor is it irrelevant that, despite the secret mass surveillance programs of the NSA, so far as I am aware, no innocent citizen in a democratic society has suffered serious harm as a consequence. It is beyond the West that the NSA’s surveillance regime has proved lethal. When Michael Hayden said, “We kill people based on metadata”, it was the NSA’s role in the drone assassination program in the war against al-Qaeda that he had in mind. Even the relation between the two strongest charges laid by Snowden and some of his supporters – the anti-democratic secrecy of NSA surveillance on the one hand and its psychological effects on citizens through its assault on privacy on the other – is more complex and contradictory than they realise. While the mass surveillance remained secret, no one was aware that their privacy was being violated. Ironically, it is thanks to Snowden that this is now clear.
Some of Snowden’s supporters, even one as perceptive as Greenwald, have used the word “totalitarian” to describe the United States because of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. This involves an obvious category mistake. In totalitarian states, surveillance is linked to the secret police and the interrogation cell; its purpose is control over society and the crushing of dissent. In the United States and other democratic societies, mass surveillance plays no such role. Snowden is here more moderate than many of his supporters. But even his descriptions of the programs – the creation of an “architecture of oppression”, opening up the possibility of a “turnkey tyranny” – presuppose future radical changes in the character of the political culture of the United States or other democratic systems that seem to me remote.
None of this, however, ought to undermine the historical significance of what Edward Snowden has achieved. As perhaps no other figure in contemporary history, he has forced the world to confront a question of civilisational significance. His story is, in the end, about a world where, in the most prosperous and privileged society on Earth, technological wizardry in the service of political paranoia and disproportionate security fears have begun to build a universal surveillance regime. But it is also a story about a world where an exemplary act of courage and intelligence has alerted us to the consequent madness and dangers.
Almost everyone who has written favourably about Snowden makes reference to George Orwell and Big Brother and the totalitarian threat. They might rather have taken another idea from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston Smith believed that if there was hope it lay with the proles. What the Snowden story seems to me to show is that if there is hope for us it lies with the young.
The Monthly, September 2014
DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY
In February 2016, while the US primaries were still being held, I attended a dinner party for Australian-born military strategist David Kilcullen. Kilcullen asked who we thought would win the US election. Almost everyone predicted a Hillary Clinton victory. Without pausing for thought, I opted for Donald Trump. Later, as Trump’s views and insults became ever more extreme, I gradually, and as it turned out wrongly, changed my mind.
My initial response to the question of who was likely to be the next US president was based on observation of the politics in the Anglophone world across the past fifty years and on a theory arising from that observation. The theory, in brief, goes like this:
Since the late 1960s the Anglophone countries – the United States, Britain and Australia (I know little at first-hand about Canada) – have undergone two profound revolutions, one in the sphere of culture, the other in the sphere of political economy.
The cultural revolution, the more profound, occurred first, beginning in the second half of the ’60s. It challenged and to some extent overturned centuries-old Western “values”: the superiority of the white “race” over all other races, which legitimised a long history of racial discrimination at home and colonialism abroad; the intellectual inferiority of the female to the male; the view that humankind was master of the natural world, which was to be used to serve our economic interests; the human species’ right to exploit other species to satisfy our needs; the characterisation of all non-heterosexual sexual practices or desires as perversions; the stigmatisation or gentle mockery of the disabled.
The revolution in the sphere of political economy occurred about a decade after the cultural revolution. This revolution had many names but most common was neo-liberalism. What neo-liberalism challenged and to some extent overturned was the Keynesian social-democratic economic order introduced throughout the Anglophone world (with differing degrees of thoroughness) after World War II. Free trade was now preferred to protectionism in any of its many forms; low taxes were preferred to high taxes; private enterprise was preferred to public enterprise and to what used to be called the mixed economy; deregulation was preferred to regulation; the free market was preferred to government intervention; the size and expansion of the social welfare state was regarded as a serious problem that had be addressed.
The two revolutions – in the sphere of culture and in the sphere of the political economy – were welcomed with differing degrees of enthusiasm by differing social groups.
The cultural revolution was embraced most enthusiastically by left-leaning “cosmopolitans”, often young, who felt at home in the new world of values – those entering the liberal professions, doctors, lawyers, architects; academics, postgraduate and undergraduate students; public servants; those working in the new or swiftly expanding tertiary sector of the economy – in health, education, advertising, information technology, public relations, media and entertainment.
The revolution in the sphere of the political economy was embraced most enthusiastically by right-leaning cosmopolitans, who prospered in the new globalised economy: the owners and managers of large-scale multinational corporations; bankers; private enterprise economists; shareholders; substantial property owners; prosperous small business proprietors; certain elements of those older professions closely linked to business.
Both these revolutions were resisted to some extent or other by large sections of those outside the spheres of the left-leaning and right-leaning cosmopolitans. “Parochials” is the most accurate term that has been used to describe them.
The cultural revolution was resisted by less prosperous whites, males but also females; by those without a tertiary education; by those who lived in small towns and rural areas; by Christians who belonged to old churches or new, born-again evangelical communities and, more generally, by social conservatives; by patriots who believed in the immaculate goodness of their own nation and its history; by those who were appalled by what they took to be the breakdown of law and order and the growth of what looked like immorality and perversion, with the rise of drug-taking, petty crime and what was considered to be sexual anarchy. For these people, the cult
ural revolution appeared as an offence to common sense that was being imposed on them by big city–based, left-leaning cosmopolitans whom they spoke of as the “elites”. A potent term – political correctness – that was used as a general descriptor for the world view that the parochials thought was being forced on them by the cultural cosmopolitans became common in the early ’90s.
The revolution in the sphere of the political economy was resisted by less prosperous citizens, especially by those whose traditional way of life was disrupted by the forces of globalisation, in particular the manufacturing working classes; small farmers and the country workers who relied on them; declining uncompetitive small businesses; fearful coalminers or others working for the fossil-fuel industries; and by those for whom globalisation seemed to offer not new opportunity but unemployment, underemployment or permanent economic marginalisation.
The advance of the two revolutions and the resistance to them created a new kind of cleavage in Anglophone societies, a cleavage based not on the principal class division of late nineteenth and twentieth-century industrial society – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – but on the division concerning both culture and economy that had emerged as a consequence of the two post-’60s revolutions. On one side of this cleavage were cosmopolitans who welcomed one or other or both of the revolutions. On the other side were the parochials who felt that culturally and economically they were being robbed of their world by the ascendancy of the cosmopolitan elites.