Edward Snowden, The Dark Prophet
Of interest for Snowden's unprecedented email interview by Time:
In an interview with Time conducted via e-mail in early December, Snowden
explained his answers to those big questions, even as he allowed for the
fact that the U.S. public he sees himself serving may not ultimately agree.
The privacy of regular citizens, he believes, is a universal right, and the
dangers of mass surveillance litter the dark corners of the 20th century.
“The NSA is surely not the Stasi,” he argued, in reference to the
notorious East German security service, “but we should always remember
that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will
spontaneously decide to embrace mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us
bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy
will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an
operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.”
“The NSA is surely not the Stasi,” he argued, in reference to the
notorious East German security service, “but we should always remember
that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will
spontaneously decide to embrace mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us
bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy
will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an
operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.”
From Russia, Snowden does not defend every story that has been written, but
he says he tried to design his actions to ensure that he was not the ultimate
arbiter of what should and should not become public. “There have of
course been some stories where my calculation of what is not public interest
differs from that of reporters, but it is for this precise reason that
publication decisions were entrusted to journalists and their editors,”
he told Time. “I recognize I have clear biases influencing my
judgment.”
Snowden’s hope, he continued, is that the disclosure will force five
distinct civic bodies—the public, the technologist community, the U.S.
courts, Congress and the Executive Branch—to reconsider the path ahead.
“The President,” Snowden wrote, “could plausibly use the mandate
of public knowledge to both reform these programs to reasonable standards
and direct the NSA to focus its tremendous power toward developing new global
technical standards that enforce robust end-to-end security, ensuring that
not only are we not improperly surveilling individuals but that other governments
aren’t either.”
But the court rulings and briefing books that undergird the surveillance
programs have long been so highly classified and technically complex that
they remained opaque to the public. Snowden believed that the standard for
review needed to be different, with transparent public debate and open court
proceedings. In the tradition of other national-security whistle-blowers,
who have played a role in the messy American system of checks and balances
by leaking the Pentagon Papers and the details of President George W.
Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, Snowden decided he had an individual
obligation to defy his government and his own contractual obligations.
“What we recoil most strongly against is not that such surveillance
can theoretically occur,” he wrote to Time, “but that it was done
without a majority of society even being aware it was possible.”
As for the technologists like him, it is important that they know as well
what is being done, so they can invent new ways to protect citizens. “There
is a technical solution to every political problem,” Snowden argued.
One of the NSA programs he revealed, called Bullrun, described a $250 million
annual effort to engage with “the U.S. and foreign IT industries to
covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’
designs,” providing the spies a back door to encrypted communications.
Though the law-enforcement purpose of such an effort is clear, as terrorists
and foreign powers experiment with encryption, Snowden believes private citizens
also have a right to create unbreakable encryption software. “In general,
if you agree with the First Amendment principles, you agree with encryption.
It’s just code,” he wrote in an e-mail to Time. “Arguing against
encryption would be analogous to arguing against hidden meanings in paintings
or poetry.”
http://poy.time.com/2013/12/11/runner-up-edward-snowden-the-dark-prophet
Edward Snowden, The Dark Prophet
He pulled off the year's most spectacular heist. Exiled from his country,
the 30-year-old computer whiz has become the doomsayer of the information
age
By Michael Scherer @michaelscherer Dec. 11, 2013
To avoid surveillance, the first four Americans to visit Edward Snowden in
Moscow carried no cell phones or laptops. They flew coach on Delta from
Washington with tickets paid for by Dutch computer hackers. After checking
into a preselected hotel not far from Red Square, they waited for a van to
pick them up for dinner.
None could retrace the ride that followed, driven by anonymous Russian security
men, nor could any place the side door of the building where the trip ended.
They passed through two cavernous ballrooms, the second with a painted ceiling
like the Sistine Chapel, and emerged into a smaller space with salmon-colored
walls and oil paintings in golden frames—like Alice in Wonderland, remembers
one of the group. There at the bottom of the rabbit hole, in rimless glasses,
a black suit and blue shirt with two open buttons at the collar, stood the
30-year-old computer whiz who had just committed the most spectacular heist
in the history of spycraft.
By all accounts, Snowden was delighted to see his countrymen, though over
the next six hours he did not partake of the wine. At one point, Ray McGovern,
a former CIA analyst, recited from memory in Russian an Alexander Pushkin
poem, “The Prisoner,” which he had learned back in his days spying
on the Soviet Union. “We have nothing to lose except everything, so
let us go ahead,” said Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department
attorney, quoting Albert Camus’s warning at the dawn of the nuclear
age. Another attendee, the whistle-blowing FBI agent Coleen Rowley, compared
Snowden to Benjamin Franklin, who as postmaster general in 1773 helped leak
letters from American officials who were secretly collaborating with British
authorities.
Even Snowden’s Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, raised his glass for
a toast. Coming from a man with close ties to the Kremlin and a knack for
misleading the press, Kucherena’s words captured the surreal nature
of Snowden’s Moscow exile. “Ed, I am going to give you the biggest
gift that I can probably give,” he told Snowden through an interpreter.
“I’m writing a novel about you.”
The gathering had been called to deliver an award, given by four dissident
veterans of the U.S. national-security apparatus to one of their own. But
for Snowden it was something more, a chance to reaffirm to the world the
purpose of his actions, for which he has been charged in absentia with theft
and violations of the Espionage Act. Since escaping his country in late May
with tens of thousands of its most secret documents—“one of
everything,” jokes one person with access to the stash—Snowden
has chosen to lie low. No Twitter account. No television interviews. No direct
contacts with U.S. authorities. He held his tongue as Kucherena boasted to
the press about Snowden’s new Internet job in Moscow, his new Russian
girlfriend and his dire money troubles. Most of that is fiction, like the
novel, according to several people who communicate regularly with Snowden.
But he has nonetheless begun to figure out a life for himself in Russia,
where he has been granted asylum for at least one year. He is learning Russian,
recently read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and spent weeks
living with his WikiLeaks protector, Sarah Harrison, who has since flown
to Berlin, fearing that she could face criminal charges if she returns to
her native Britain. Most important, he has been able to spend time on the
Internet, his lifelong home, where he has watched through encrypted and
anonymized connections as his leaks roil the world—diplomatic crises,
congressional reform efforts, new federal lawsuits, financial damage to U.S.
technology companies and an as yet uncertain harm to U.S. national interests,
including documented changes in the way terrorists communicate online.
“This increases the probability that a terrorist attack will get
through,” says General Keith Alexander, the director of the National
Security Agency (NSA). “I think it’s absolutely wrong.”
For Snowden, those impacts are but a means to a different end. He didn’t
give up his freedom to tip off German Chancellor Angela Merkel about the
American snoops on her cell phone or to detail the ways the NSA electronically
records jihadi porn-watching habits. He wanted to issue a warning to the
world, and he believed that revealing the classified information at his
fingertips was the way to do it. His gambit has so far proved more successful
than he reasonably could have hoped—he is alive, not in prison, and
six months on, his documents still make headlines daily—but his work
is not done, and his fate is far from certain. So in early October, he invited
to Moscow some supporters who wanted to give him an award.
After the toasts, some photographs and a brief ceremony, Snowden sat back
down at the table, spread with a Russian buffet, to describe once again the
dystopian landscape he believes is unfolding inside the classified computer
networks on which he worked as a contractor. Here was a place that collected
enormous amounts of information on regular citizens as a precaution, a place
where U.S. law and policy did not recognize the right to privacy of foreigners
operating outside the country, a place where he believed the basic freedoms
of modern democratic states—“to speak and to think and to live
and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely”—were
under threat.
“There is a far cry between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate
law enforcement—where it is targeted, it’s based on reasonable
suspicion, individualized suspicion and warranted action—and the sort
of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under a sort of
an eye and sees everything, even when it is not needed,” Snowden told
his colleagues. “This is about a trend in the relationship between the
governing and governed in America.”
That is the thing that led him to break the law, the notion that mass
surveillance undermines the foundations of private citizenship. In a way,
it is the defining critique of the information age, in which data is increasingly
the currency of power. The idea did not originate with Snowden, but no one
has done more to advance it. “The effect has been transformative,”
argues Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been helping Snowden
from the confines of the Ecuadorean embassy in London. “We have shifted
from a small group of experts understanding what was going on to broad public
awareness of the reality of NSA mass surveillance.” If Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg is the sunny pied piper of the new sharing economy, Snowden
has become its doomsayer.
The Information Grid
When electronic surveillance began, with the invention of the telegraph and
radio, the only way to record an intercept was with ink and paper. Now there
are technologies that allow for the wholesale copying, sorting and storage
of billions of records a day—everything that passes through a
fiber-optic cable, for instance, or gets beamed through the airwaves.
By itself, this is a revolutionary development. But its real power comes
from the way regular people have changed their behavior. In the 19th century,
humans rarely produced electronic signals. Now almost every part of daily
existence can cast off bits and bytes.
The cell phone in your pocket records your movements and stores that information
with your service carrier. The e-mail, chat and text messages you create
map your social relations and record your thoughts. Credit-card purchases
show spending habits and tastes. Mass-transit databases note when you board
subways and buses with fare cards. The search terms you enter into your
laptop—preserved by Google in ways that can be used to identify
your computer for a standard period of nine months—may tell more about
your deepest desires than anything you would ever admit to a friend or lover.
Then there are the emerging technologies that will soon add even more information
to the grid: The wearable-computing devices that monitor your pulse. The
networked surveillance cameras rigged with facial-recognition software. The
smart meters that record what time of night you turn out the lights. Retail
companies like Nordstrom and Apple have debuted technologies that use
your cell phones to track how long you linger before any single display.
The possibilities are dizzying, and your information funds the whole enterprise.
“Surveillance is the business model of the Internet,” explains
Bruce Schneier, a security technologist who has access to some of the documents
Snowden provided.
Snowden’s theft revealed a massive, secret U.S. national-security
state—$52.6 billion a year, with more than 30,000 employees at the NSA
alone—struggling to come to grips with this new surveillance potential
in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Electronic intelligence historically
focused on foreign governments and their public officials, but the hijackers
who took down the World Trade Center were private individuals, born abroad
and living in the homeland. So as the rubble still smoldered, the great arrays
set up by the NSA turned inward and shifted focus. The subjects of collection
grew to include patterns within entire populations and historical data that
could literally retrace the steps of individuals years before they became
suspects. The challenge, explained one NSA document made public by Snowden,
was to “master global networks and handle previously unimagined
volumes of raw data for both passive and active collection.”
So new databases were built, and ground was broken on a massive classified
data center in the Utah desert that will need as much as 1.7 million gal.
(6.4 million L) of water a day just to keep the computer servers cool. And
the data was collected. Since 2006 the U.S. government has gathered and stored
transaction records of phone calls made in America. For a time, the government
sucked up similar metadata on Internet traffic as well. Cellular location
data, mostly from foreign-owned phones, has also been collected, with some
5 billion records a day absorbed by databases that can later be used to
reconstruct a person’s movements or find out who joins a meeting behind
closed doors.
One NSA document released by Snowden estimated that 99% of the world’s
Internet bandwidth in 2002 and 33% of the world’s phone calls in 2003
passed through the U.S., an accident of history that proved a gold mine to
sift through, with or without the cooperation of American companies. The
agency hacked overseas cables and satellites and surreptitiously sucked
information transiting among foreign cloud servers of U.S. technology companies
like Google and Yahoo. It harvested and stored hundreds of millions of contact
lists from personal e-mail and instant-messaging accounts on services like
Yahoo and Facebook. A program called Dishfire sucked up years’ worth
of text messages from around the world, and a database by the name of Tracfin
captured credit-card transactions. “High performance computing systems
must extract meaning from huge data sets and negate data encryption and computer
access controls,” reads a 2007 classified NSA mission statement released
by Snowden. “Fortunately, information management and mining is central
to the Internet age.”
The NSA is not the only one playing the game. It just does it better, on
a grander scale, than anyone else, at least so far. Russia and China have
similar surveillance infrastructures, say current and former U.S. officials,
and petty dictatorships the world over have been buying their technology
on the open market. When rebels overthrew Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi
in 2011, they found a device from the French company Amesys that allowed
the dictator to gather up and search in bulk the Internet traffic generated
by his people. No Libyan activist had been safe to send an unencrypted e-mail
or post a Facebook comment. The company’s sales pitch, later leaked
to WikiLeaks, began with a slide that read, “From lawful to massive
interception.”
Privacy Protections
With all this information now public, the important questions are easy to
spot: What should distinguish democratic governments from totalitarian ones
in an era of mass surveillance? Are privacy protections a human right or
just a convenience of nationality? Can the massive U.S. national-security
apparatus be trusted to make the right choices in secret when the next crisis
comes? Even President Obama encourages the conversation as he continues to
seek Snowden’s imprisonment. “I think it’s healthy for our
democracy,” he said just weeks before the White House refused to confirm
or deny its role in rerouting the plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales
after a false rumor that Snowden was on board.
In an interview with Time conducted via e-mail in early December, Snowden
explained his answers to those big questions, even as he allowed for
the fact that the U.S. public he sees himself serving may not ultimately
agree. The privacy of regular citizens, he believes, is a universal right,
and the dangers of mass surveillance litter the dark corners of the 20th
century. “The NSA is surely not the Stasi,” he argued, in reference
to the notorious East German security service, “but we should always
remember that the danger to societies from security services is not
that they will spontaneously decide to embrace mustache twirling and jackboots
to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation
of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to
prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.”
Snowden’s hope, he continued, is that the disclosure will force five
distinct civic bodies—the public, the technologist community, the U.S.
courts, Congress and the Executive Branch—to reconsider the path ahead.
“The President,” Snowden wrote, “could plausibly use the mandate
of public knowledge to both reform these programs to reasonable standards
and direct the NSA to focus its tremendous power toward developing new global
technical standards that enforce robust end-to-end security, ensuring that
not only are we not improperly surveilling individuals but that other governments
aren’t either.”
As for the technologists like him, it is important that they know as well
what is being done, so they can invent new ways to protect citizens. “There
is a technical solution to every political problem,” Snowden argued.
One of the NSA programs he revealed, called Bullrun, described a $250 million
annual effort to engage with “the U.S. and foreign IT industries to
covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’
designs,” providing the spies a back door to encrypted communications.
Though the law-enforcement purpose of such an effort is clear, as
terrorists and foreign powers experiment with encryption, Snowden believes
private citizens also have a right to create unbreakable encryption software.
“In general, if you agree with the First Amendment principles, you agree
with encryption. It’s just code,” he wrote in an e-mail to Time.
“Arguing against encryption would be analogous to arguing against hidden
meanings in paintings or poetry.”
America In the Dark
The NSA, for its part, has always prided itself on being different from the
intelligence services of authoritarian regimes, and it has long collected
far less information on Americans than it could. The programs Snowden revealed
in U.S. surveillance agencies, at least since the 1970s, are subject
to a strict, regularly audited system of checks and balances and a complex
set of rules that restrict the circumstances under which the data gathered
on Americans can be reviewed. As a general rule, a court order is still expected
to review the content of American phone calls and e-mail messages.
Unclassified talking points sent home with NSA employees for Thanksgiving
put it this way: “The NSA performs its mission the right
way—lawful, compliant and in a way that protects civil liberties
and privacy.” Indeed, none of the Snowden disclosures published to date
have revealed any ongoing programs that clearly violate current law, at least
in a way that any court has so far identified. Parts of all three branches
of government had been briefed and had given their approval.
But the court rulings and briefing books that undergird the surveillance
programs have long been so highly classified and technically complex that
they remained opaque to the public. Snowden believed that the standard for
review needed to be different, with transparent public debate and open court
proceedings. In the tradition of other national-security whistle-blowers,
who have played a role in the messy American system of checks and balances
by leaking the Pentagon Papers and the details of President George W.
Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, Snowden decided he had an individual
obligation to defy his government and his own contractual obligations.
“What we recoil most strongly against is not that such surveillance
can theoretically occur,” he wrote to Time, “but that it was done
without a majority of society even being aware it was possible.”
At the time Snowden went public, the American people had not just been kept
in the dark; they had actively been misled about the actions of their government.
The provision of the 2001 Patriot Act that allowed for the collection of
American phone records, for instance, was publicly described as analogous
to a grand jury subpoena by the Department of Justice, suggesting individual
secret warrants. But secret interpretations told a different story. “Tell
me if you’ve ever seen a grand jury subpoena that allowed the
government on an ongoing basis to collect the records of millions of
ordinary Americans,” said Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a longtime critic
of the programs, in a recent speech.
In a 2012 speech, NSA director Alexander said, “We don’t hold data
on U.S. citizens,” a statement he apparently justified with an unusual
definition of the word hold. Months later, National Intelligence Director
James Clapper told Congress in an open session that the NSA did not
“collect” any type of data on millions of Americans. After the
Snowden documents were leaked, Clapper apologized for his “clearly
erroneous” answer, saying he was only giving the “least
untruthful” response possible in an unclassified setting. “When
someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific meaning, which
may have a different meaning to him,” Clapper said.
Intelligence officials have now been forced to join the public debate, and
Obama has authorized the declassification of thousands of pages of documents.
Nonetheless, current and former government officials say the way Snowden
went about leaking his documents and the documents he selected will cause
clear harm to his country’s legitimate interests. “We have seen,
in response to the Snowden leaks, al-Qaeda and affiliated groups seeking
to change their tactics,” warned Matthew Olson, director of the National
Counterterrorism Center, in July. Snowden has maintained that he did not
download information that would put other intelligence officials in danger
or give up sources and specific methods to foreign rivals of the U.S. But
his disclosures were also not limited to revealing the mass surveillance
of otherwise innocent civilian populations.
While in Hong Kong, Snowden gave an interview and documents to the South
China Morning Post describing NSA spying on Chinese universities, a disclosure
that frustrated American attempts to embarrass China into reducing its
industrial-espionage efforts against U.S. firms. A story that showed up in
Der Spiegel, using Snowden documents, showed how British spies working with
the U.S. used fake LinkedIn accounts to install malware on the computers
of foreign telecom providers. Other stories have given details on NSA spying
operations on traditional surveillance targets like diplomatic delegations
at international summits. And many of the most controversial disclosures
in the Snowden documents concern not mass surveillance but the targeting
of foreign leaders. “They’re being put out in a way that does the
maximum damage to NSA and our nation,” says Alexander. “And it’s
hurting our industry.”
American technology and telecommunications companies, some of which have
long histories of cooperating with the NSA, have also suffered as a result,
and they are scrambling to increase encryption of their systems and assure
foreign customers of their commitment to privacy. A December paper by eight
U.S. technology giants, including Apple, Facebook and Google, called on the
U.S. government to end to “bulk data collection of Internet
communications” and “limit surveillance to specific, known users
for lawful purposes.” In India, government officials may soon be barred
from using e-mail with servers located in the U.S., and recent estimates
say the risk to American firms in the emerging marketplace for cloud computing
could reach $180 billion. In a recent earnings call, Robert
Lloyd—president of development for Cisco Systems, a provider of
Internet hardware—said the revelations were already affecting overseas
sales. “It’s certainly causing people to stop and then rethink
decisions, and that is, I think, reflected in our results,” he said.
From Russia, Snowden does not defend every story that has been written, but
he says he tried to design his actions to ensure that he was not the
ultimate arbiter of what should and should not become public. “There
have of course been some stories where my calculation of what is not public
interest differs from that of reporters, but it is for this precise reason
that publication decisions were entrusted to journalists and their
editors,” he told Time. “I recognize I have clear biases influencing
my judgment.”
That question of judgment is at the heart of the issues Snowden has raised.
Polls still show Americans largely conflicted about the programs that have
been revealed. Since the disclosures, a majority of Americans say they believe
their privacy rights have been violated. But polls also show continued
willingness to give up limited amounts of privacy as part of efforts to combat
terrorism.
The most striking numbers show a generation gap in the way people think about
Snowden. Just 35% of Americans ages 18 to 30 say Snowden should be charged
with a crime, compared with 57% of those 30 and older, according to a November
poll by the Washington Post and ABC News. And 56% of young adults say he
did the “right thing,” compared with 32% of their elders. Younger
people, who are moving away from Facebook and embracing technologies like
Snapchat, which destroys messages after a few seconds, have also been shown
to spend far more time than their elders tightening privacy settings on phones
and apps. “Snowden is an effect, not a cause,” says General Michael
Hayden, a recently retired director of both the NSA and CIA. “This new
generation has a different take on where the appropriate line is.”
The shifts could have far greater implications than just what apps people
choose for their smartphones. Historically, the Fourth Amendment of the
Constitution, which offers no protections for noncitizens outside the
country, has been the source of privacy protections under U.S. law. But the
rhetoric now coming from European governments and even senior officials of
the Obama Administration points to broader, as yet undefined rights, which
several countries are now seeking to codify in international law at
the U.N. “We must use the unprecedented power that technology affords
us responsibly, while respecting the values of privacy, government transparency
and accountability that all people share,” said National Security Adviser
Susan Rice in a December speech.
Growing Up Online
The fourth American to attend Snowden’s October awards ceremony was
Thomas Drake, who, like Snowden, was a veteran of the NSA and a former contractor
for Booz Allen Hamilton. For years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Drake sounded
alarm bells with Congress and the military about the NSA’s behavior,
eventually deciding to give unclassified information about certain programs
to a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. For this, he was charged under the Espionage
Act on flimsy charges that fell apart in court but still caused Drake
years of hardship. When the Americans walked in for dinner in Moscow,
McGovern remembers that Snowden looked past him and focused on Drake,
whom Snowden had never met before but had long regarded as a role model.
“I was an inspiration to him,” Drake acknowledges. “He represents,
for me, the future.”
Like Snowden, Drake grew up online, living his life inside the nascent Internet,
finding friendships and forming an identity. His first computer, in the 1980s,
was an Atari 8-bit. “I lived a double life, the virtual life in this
digital space, in this transnational space,” says Drake, who is now
56. “It was unbelievable, this culture of sharing information.”
For Snowden, a high school dropout with a GED who grew up just miles from
the NSA’s headquarters in Maryland, the Internet was also always a source
of identity. His father, a Coast Guard officer, and his mother, a clerk in
federal court, separated when he was young. As a teen, he spent years playing
games online. As a young CIA employee in Switzerland, he vented and socialized
regularly on anonymous chat boards. In this virtual space, national borders
mattered less, and electronic privacy mattered more. By the time he had risen
to become a senior technical consultant for the CIA, working as a Dell
contractor, those values remained. “The one thing you resisted was this
authoritarian power that wanted to own you,” says Drake, who will quote
Star Trek and Tron to explain his values. “I was with the user.”
At some point in the coming months or years, Snowden’s fate will be
decided. It is not clear if his asylum in Russia will be renewed. He continues
to receive financial support from abroad, and a team of lawyers around the
world is working on his behalf, pursuing other asylum applications and waiting
on offers of negotiation from the U.S. authorities. Though the Department
of Justice has promised not to apply the death penalty, no other offers of
leniency have been forthcoming.
As the dinner wound down, Harrison, Snowden’s WikiLeaks adviser,
explained to the group why she had put her life in legal jeopardy to help
Snowden. “There needs to be another narrative,” she said in reference
to Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army private formerly known as Bradley, who
leaked massive amounts of documents and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
“There needs to be a happy ending. People need to see that you can do
this and be safe.”
Snowden, a libertarian activist who gave up his freedom only to live at the
whim of an authoritarian state, has not fully succeeded in that regard. But
he will not be the last of his kind, either. Both Assange and Laura Poitras,
one of the first journalists Snowden contacted, say his efforts have already
emboldened other leakers. “What Snowden did was really empowering,”
says Poitras. “I mean, think of all the people who have security clearance.
There are hundreds of thousands, millions of them. They see that this is
really a historic moment, and they are starting to question their belief
in the job they were asked to do.”
It is an odd corollary to this new era of mass surveillance: the same
technologies that give states vast new powers increase the ability of individuals
on the inside to resist. Those dynamics are fixed, a code that underpins
the world we now inhabit. That is what Snowden ultimately realized and exploited,
a matter of simple physics. His example is the most consequential and dramatic,
but it is unlikely to be the last.
—with reporting by Simon Shuster/Berlin
No comments:
Post a Comment