Edward Snowden | [BTW] : Ben Trube, Writer

The words of a Whitehall official (UK) to Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian.

I’m attending FourthCon this weekend, another in a continuing set of protests by the group RestoreTheFourth that is concerned with privacy rights, particularly in light of the NSA leaks.

The wonderful trailer for this event is below:

Why is RestoreTheFourth still protesting? They had their fun on July 4th but now it’s time to move on to the next thing in the news cycle.

This seems to be our prevailing attitude whenever something significant happens in the news. Are you still talking about the George Zimmerman verdict? How about Sandy Hook? We all acknowledge that these events bring up important issues worthy of public debate, but only for a week or two.

That’s one of the things that’s been notable about how the Guardian has been doing its reporting (and other papers like the Washington Post). New details of the NSA leak trickle out every week, including this one from the Washington Post about a recent NSA audit that found thousands of privacy violations. This kind of reporting, rather than a huge knowledge dump all at once, is an effort to keep the issue in the public consciousness, an effort that faces some long odds.

Alan Rusbridger reported yesterday on The Guardian about the detain of Glenn Greenwald’s (author of a lot of the initial Snowden coverage) partner and on the destruction of hard drives at the Guardian by British officials. Given the nature of our technological society, destroying a few hard drives has little impact on the actual reporting of a story, but it sends a powerful message.

Someone wants this reporting to stop.

You’ve had your fun. Now let’s move on.

We’re not about to.

I didn’t have an immediate reaction to the NSA story, in fact I picked it up a couple of days late.

Some of my friends have reacted with anger, and some have already created a resistance movement. Those who are outraged by the fact that the NSA has been tracking our every internet move believe you should be angry too. It’s unacceptable to be agnostic on this issue, to have the “meh” reaction so many of us have had. “I’m not doing anything wrong so why should I worry” or “I always assumed this was happening anyway.”

For me this hasn’t been a story it has been quite so easy to get outraged about. There’s a couple of things I’ve been thinking about the last few weeks, some assumptions I’ve been challenging while I try to figure out how to feel and what to do.

For starters I have always assumed the job of President is harder than anyone but the men who hold that job can know. We’ve seen it too often where a candidate makes promises for transparency, or specific actions to change some policy the public doesn’t like, and when the candidate gets into the office it doesn’t happen. We can assume that all politicians are disingenuous, and I believe many of us do, but I also think that they get a wake up call to the world as it really is when they sit in the Oval Office. There are realities of this world that the government, the intelligence community and the military do not want us to know, because they don’t want us to be cowering under our desks in fear in every day.

There has been some effort by Congress and the intelligence community to show us some of this reality, to show us all of the plots that PRISM has stopped. But we are still not convinced. After all, no matter how much data this thing was gathering it did nothing to stop the Boston marathon bombing, or any one of a number of gun related tragedies in the past year. To me this is not that surprising. The undertaking that PRISM is attempting is big data in it’s biggest sense (I had to look up what a zettabyte even was). Most predictive software (from Netflix recommendations or Google searches) requires a lot of data, time, and specificity. Predicting a terrorist plot is not a simple of an algorithm as predicting which movie you might like. Of course PRISM doesn’t always work.

I know it’s an idealistic assumption to believe that the government and the intelligence community always has our best interests in mind, and I don’t really believe that. At best I might believe that the average behavior of individuals in the NSA and contractors like Snowden is positive, that some can and will abuse their power, while others will only seek the public good, and that the good tends to outweigh the bad.

The other assumption I’ve been challenging is the one from the “meh” reaction. We already allow ourselves to be tracked on the internet by social networks, by online retailers and by search engines. Google’s been storing all my e-mail for the past 4-5 years (and I know that delete doesn’t really mean delete). I hope they won’t read it, but I know they could. Future employers look at our facebook pages, and all other vestiges of our online presence to get a sense of whether we’re a good employee, or one who likes to party every night. There are lots of justifications for why Google and Facebook tracking us is okay, and why the NSA thing is so much worse, but I don’t think we should kid ourselves.

But just because we are tracked doesn’t mean we should just give up. While I do think it is important to maintain a certain brand image on the internet, to control as much of what you are saying and what others say about you as we can, we equally need to be able to say whatever we want. The approach I take to this problem is technological, and in some future posts I’ll talk about private web-browsing and encrypted e-mail. To me that’s what you can do right now to protect your privacy. We can challenge the government, demand transparency and change, and we should but I have a feeling if we cut one head off this hydra, another will rise up to take its place.

So a word of advice in place of a conclusion. Check out the Tor Browser. And maybe try EnigMail. Help those who fight to keep your data private, and have been doing so long before you knew about PRISM. And reflect as well as take action. The battle for the privacy of our data has been going on a long time, and we’ve generally been surrendering without a fight.