Watch the changes taking place in the privacy field and how they affect society today
Edward Snowden and Pulitzer Prize winners Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges recently got together for a presentation by Amy Goode Mann hosted a video conference call. Democracy nowIn the video, the group talks about privacy issues and other major events over the past eight years. After Snowden leaked documents from the NSA and left office in 2013, he has lived in Moscow and has since been charged with violating the Espionage Act. The discussion explores his history, Julian Assange’s self-imposed exile in London, and the relationship between government and personal privacy in light of Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance.
In the first part of the call, Snowden reviewed how his IT career developed to be able to see the full scope and depth of the NSA’s mass surveillance program he leaked to various journalists.Snowden is now Press Freedom Foundation, an organization that provides journalists with several privacy-enhancing tools, such as Signal, a secure messaging and file sharing application, and Press Freedom Tracker, a website that tracks how many American journalists have been arrested or attacked (by their count, 142 in 2021, down from 436 in 2020).
Greenwald reflects on how he and Snowden met in 2013. “Usually, you would expect to find someone with high-level security access in suburban Washington, not Hong Kong.” He first asked for about 20 documents to review Snowden’s authenticity. “They are shocking and show how nine tech companies are involved in wholesale tracking of their customers and how they can provide this information to the government without any liability what we know now is Prism program. The next day he flew to Hong Kong and began their collaboration. “I read these top-secret NSA documents on that flight, not the best operational security for sure.” Greenwald was surprised by his newly found source for two things: “First, I was expecting someone older, say in their sixties (Snowden was 30 at the time), and in the security service. A longer career in the department is coming to an end. Second, he wants to reveal his identity in our coverage. He didn’t want to hide his identity or explain to the public why he did it and risk going to jail. ”
For the past eight years, “Obama has aggressively used espionage laws to shut down investigative journalism,” Hedges said. “Government employees are now nervous about talking to journalists. The wholesale system of government surveillance has closed our access to any real national security reporting by those in power.” Plus many news outlets have reduced or closed their offices due to lower costs. The trend of foreign agencies does not bode well for future reporting. “It’s expensive to cover a war, especially if you want to be safe from kidnapping. For example, I use armored vehicles and satellite phones in Bosnia,” he said.
Snowden has his own dire warnings. “The nature of the state and its relationship with the media has changed over the past eight years.” He mentioned that he – and others employed by the government – do not make any “secrecy oaths.” Instead, it’s actually a nondisclosure agreement. “What we do is take oath of service, allegiance to the Constitution. But what happens when your activity is illegal and it conflicts with it? I believe I have an obligation to divulge these secret documents and bring attention to these procedures. ”
if you haven’t seen Fourth Citizen, a documentary about Snowden’s 2013 campaign, it’s worth seeing how he made that decision.
Snowden also spoke about the “single executive branch” philosophy that guided Bush and subsequent administrations about their absolute power. “On this view, the legislature and the judiciary have no role here,” he said.On this note, there is a excellent work Joan Didion recounts the origins of this view on Dick Cheney.
“We used to have to go to a judge to get a search warrant for a suspect. Now, we’ve been collecting all this information about you, and now companies are helping to collect that information before any suspicion,” Snowden said. Summing up the past few years, he said, “We are in a post-truth dynamic where the actual facts are in dispute.”
The group also discussed 2017 The CIA plotted to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy. He is now sitting in a London prison awaiting extradition to the United States, where he faces a maximum sentence of 175 years for espionage. Hedges said: “The mainstream media hates Assange. They hate him because he shames them for doing their job. They want to present themselves as the center of journalism and ethics, and that’s why they want to get back at him.” Snowden agreed : “Assange was the publisher, not the source of any whistleblower data. To say that Assange hacked the Pentagon is absolutely ridiculous. His crime was telling the truth about something the government didn’t want to make public.”
When looking back at the events of the past eight years, it is important to observe how the privacy landscape has changed and how they are affecting society today. Chandler Givens, head of consumer privacy at Avast, commented: “Rational people may have a different view on whether Snowden’s disclosures were appropriate. Indisputably, his actions were a key event in bringing awareness to government and Private companies are all engaged in the reality of massive data collection. In the years since his leak, perceptions of privacy have shifted dramatically from a ‘tinfoil hat’ fringe topic to the defining challenge of our generation.”
