Edward Snowden, Chelsea
Manning and Julian Assange: our new heroes
We all remember President
Obama's smiling face, full of hope and trust, in his first campaign: "Yes,
we can!" – we can get rid of the cynicism of the Bush era and bring
justice and welfare to the American people. Now that the US continues its
covert operations and expands its intelligence network, spying even on its
allies, we can imagine protesters shouting at Obama: "How can you use
drones for killing? How can you spy even on our allies?" Obama murmurs
with a mockingly evil smile: "Yes, we can."
But simple personalisation
misses the point: the threat to freedom disclosed by whistleblowers has deeper,
systemic roots. Edward
Snowden should be defended not only because his acts annoyed and embarrassed
US secret services; what he revealed is something that not only the US but also
all great (and not so great) powers – from China to Russia, Germany to Israel –
are doing (to the extent they are technologically able to do it).
His acts provided a factual
foundation to our suspicions of being monitored and controlled – their lesson
is global, reaching far beyond the standard US-bashing. We didn't really learn
from Snowden (or Manning) anything we didn't already presume to be true. But it
is one thing to know it in general, another to get concrete data. It is a
little like knowing that one's sexual partner is playing around – one can
accept the abstract knowledge, but pain arises when one gets the steamy
details, pictures of what they were doing …
Back in 1843, the young Karl
Marx claimed that the German ancien regime "only imagines that it
believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same
thing". In such a situation, to put shame on those in power becomes a
weapon. Or, as Marx goes on: "The actual pressure must be made more
pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more
shameful by publicising it."
This, exactly, is our
situation today: we are facing the shameless cynicism of the representatives of
the existing global order, who only imagine that they believe in their ideas of
democracy, human rights etc. What happens in WikiLeaks disclosures is that the
shame – theirs, and ours for tolerating such power over us – is made more
shameful by publicising it. What we should be ashamed of is the worldwide
process of the gradual narrowing of the space for what Kant called the "public
use of reason".
In his classic text, What Is
Enlightenment?, Kant contrasts "public" and "private" use
of reason – "private" is for Kant the communal-institutional order in
which we dwell (our state, our nation …), while "public" is the
transnational universality of the exercise of one's reason: "The public
use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about
enlightenment among men. The private use of one's reason, on the other hand,
may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the
progress of enlightenment. By public use of one's reason I understand the use
that a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I
call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which
is entrusted to him."
We see where Kant parts with
our liberal common sense: the domain of state is "private"
constrained by particular interests, while individuals reflecting on general
issues use reason in a "public" way. This Kantian distinction is
especially pertinent with internet and other new media torn between their free
"public use" and their growing "private" control. In our
era of cloud computing, we no longer need strong individual computers: software
and information are provided on demand; users can access web-based tools or
applications through browsers.
This wonderful new world is,
however, only one side of the story. Users are accessing programs and software
files that are kept far away in climate-controlled rooms with thousands of
computers – or, to quote a propaganda-text on cloud computing: "Details
are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise in, or
control over, the technology infrastructure 'in the cloud' that supports them."
Here are two telltale words:
abstraction and control. To manage a cloud there needs to be a monitoring
system that controls its functioning, and this system is by definition hidden
from users. The more the small item (smartphone) I hold in my hand is personalised,
easy to use, "transparent" in its functioning, the more the entire
setup has to rely on the work being done elsewhere, in a vast circuit of
machines that co-ordinate the user's experience. The more our experience is
non-alienated, spontaneous, transparent, the more it is regulated by the
invisible network controlled by state agencies and large private companies that
follow their secret agendas.
Once we choose to follow the
path of state secrets, we sooner or later reach the fateful point at which the
legal regulations prescribing what is secret become secret. Kant formulated the
basic axiom of the public law: "All actions relating to the right of other
men are unjust if their maxim is not consistent with publicity." A secret
law, a law unknown to its subjects, legitimises the arbitrary despotism of
those who exercise it, as indicated in the title of a recent report on China:
"Even what's secret is a secret in China." Troublesome
intellectuals who report on political oppression, ecological catastrophes,
rural poverty etc, got years in prison for betraying a state secret, and the
catch was that many of the laws and regulations that made up the state-secret
regime were themselves classified, making it difficult for individuals to know
how and when they are in violation.
What makes the
all-encompassing control of our lives so dangerous is not that we lose our
privacy, that all our intimate secrets are exposed to Big Brother. There is no
state agency able to exert such control – not because they don't know enough,
but because they know too much. The sheer size of data is too large, and in
spite of all intricate programs for detecting suspicious messages, computers
that register billions of data are too stupid to interpret and evaluate them
properly, ridiculous mistakes where innocent bystanders are listed as potential
terrorists occur necessarily – and this makes state control of communications
even more dangerous. Without knowing why, without doing anything illegal, we
can all be listed as potential terrorists. Recall the legendary answer of a
Hearst newspaper editor to Hearst's inquiry as to why he doesn't want to take a
long-deserved holiday: "I am afraid that if I go, there will be chaos,
everything will fall apart – but I am even more afraid to discover that if I
go, things will just go on as normal without me, a proof that I am not really
needed!" Something similar can be said about the state control of our
communications: we should fear that we have no secrets, that secret state
agencies know everything, but we should fear even more that they fail in this
endeavour.
This is why whistleblowers
play a crucial role in keeping the "public reason" alive. Assange,
Manning, Snowden, these are our new heroes, exemplary cases of the new ethics
that befits our era of digitalised control. They are no longer just
whistleblowers who denounce the illegal practices of private companies to the
public authorities; they denounce these public authorities themselves when they
engage in "private use of reason".
We need Mannings and Snowdens
in China, in Russia, everywhere. There are states much more oppressive than the
US – just imagine what would have happened to someone like Manning in a Russian
or Chinese court (in all probability no public trial). However, one should not
exaggerate the softness of the US: true, the US doesn't treat prisoners as
brutally as China or Russia – because of its technological priority, it simply
does not need the brutal approach (which it is more than ready to apply when
needed). In this sense, the US is even more dangerous than China insofar as its
measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is
openly displayed.
It is therefore not enough to
play one state against the other (like Snowden, who used Russia against the
US): we need a new international network to organise the protection of
whistleblowers and the dissemination of their message. Whistleblowers are our
heroes because they prove that if those in power can do it, we can also do it.
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