Via Mark Sletten comes this thread from yesterday’s Ask Me Anything session at Reddit that featured Edward Snowden, Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, and journalist Glenn Greenwald.
The question posed to Snowden:
What’s the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?
His answer is well worth reading in full (I’ve posted it after the jump), but its essence is a full-throated defense of classical liberal and libertarian theorizing not just about the consent of the governed but the right to work around the government when it focuses on social order over legitimacy. And, as important, a recognition that this is what we at Reason and others call “the Libertarian Moment,” or a technologically empowered drive toward greater and greater control over more and more aspects of our lives. While the Libertarian Moment is enabled by technological innovations and generally increasing levels of wealth and education, it’s ultimately proceeds from a mind-set as much as anything else: We have the right to live peacefully any way we choose as long as we are not infringing on other people’s rights to do the same. Our politics and our laws should reflect this emphasis on pluralism, tolerance, and persuasion (as opposed to coercion) across social, economic, and intellectual spheres of activity.
As Snowden emphasizes, it’s not simply that governments (thankfully) fail at attempts for perfect surveillance and law enforcement. It’s that technologically empowered people are actively worked to route around government attempts to fence us in. “We the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights,” he writes (emphasis in original). “we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new—and permanent—basis.”
Reading throught the Reddit exchange, it’s easy to see why Snowden recently brought the 1,000-plus attendees of the International Students for Liberty Conference to their feet multiple times. He isn’s some kind of pie-eyed nihilist, hell-bent on destroying the red, white, and blue for personal fame or out of ideological fervor. At 31 years old, he is an exceptionally well-spoken, thoughtful critic of the abuse of power that has become endemic to modern American governance. At the ISFLC, he said his one regret is that he didn’t expose systemic infringement on citizens’ constitutional rights sooner than he did.
If people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.
How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens’ discontent.
How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where—if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen—we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new—and permanent—basis.
Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it’s entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.
Emphasis in original.
Snowden ends by noting that “when [the law] becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.”
Here’s his full answer:
This is a good question, and there are some good traditional answers here. Organizing is important. Activism is important.
At the same time, we should remember that governments don’t often reform themselves. One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, “Data and Goliath”), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.
But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?
Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had — entirely within the law — rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?
Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.
How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens’ discontent.
How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where — if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen — we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new — and permanent — basis.
Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it’s entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.
We haven’t had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we’ll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they “can” do rather than what they “should” do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.
In such times, we’d do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn’t defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.
There were once those that huffed about indignantly regarding Snowden’s college dropout status, much in the same manner that Scott Walker’s lack of a degree dominates “journalists'” conversations today.
This essay is proof that independent thought requires no documentation.
Snowden is sounding more like a grey champion every day… at least in one facet of this crisis (government over the people).
I see a move to secession in the US. I believe that a number of red states (like Texas) are going to tell the Federal Government to shove some of their laws. And also implement their own ideas when the Feds won’t act on things like immigration.
“…the law doesn’t defend us; we defend the law.”
Politicians make the laws, most of the time to protect or enhance the rights of their biggest campaign contributors. The Supreme Court, appointed, gets to interpret those laws any which way they bloody well choose, most likely in favor of those who were instrumental in putting them there. It’s a bought-and-paid-for system.
Correcting imbalances now is going to be nasty because you’d be stepping on some pretty big toes, but it has to be done. Politicians, most of whom are psychopathic types or else they wouldn’t have gotten where they are, need to have the cookie jar taken away from them. Elections need to be paid for by taxpayer funding, so much per election campaign; no more large campaign contributions from vested interests. Politicians, their family, their friends need to be barred from insider trading – period. This is a huge cookie jar for them, and of course being the type of upright citizens that they are, they can’t resist putting their hand in it.
Take the huge amounts of money out of politics, and these slime won’t even bother running. They run for the money, not for the good of the country. There are many good citizens who wouldn’t care if they lived in a mansion or could hide their money in tax havens. It wouldn’t even enter their minds. And they’re not all do-gooders who would ruin the country, but those able to ride the middle line of making things a lot more equal than they are.
Whenever you allow big money to be matched up with people whose only dream is to get big money, you get the laws you’re asking for.
backwardsevolution says: “Take the huge amounts of money out of politics, and these slime won’t even bother running. They run for the money, not for the good of the country.”
I think that is backwards. The only way to get money out of politics is to take power away from politicians. As long as they have the power the money will get to them in order to influence and control them.
TJF – that sounds great, but how are you going to take power away from them when they are the ones who write the laws? A current example: the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) now being hammered out, in secret, by politicians and corporations. No one from the labour or human rights side of things is allowed to enter the discussions. In the end, we will then have a supranational tribunal (unelected) who will decide matters between countries. Who is going to sit on this supranational court? Why, corporate lawyers, that’s who.
Either laws start getting made by politicians, but only after heavy consultation with those fighting for the rights of citizens, or you take the money away. Thieves are never where there’s no money to be made.
It’s too bad that Snowden can’t safely come back to the US. I’ve greatly respected him since the first time I heard about him, but after reading his statements here, I think he’d make a great president. I’m not sure we’ve had such a humble, America loving person for president since George Washington or may since James Madison.
Mike in Ga- Edward Snowden was a high school dropout, not college.
Edward Snowden is an American hero. He put the proof behind the “conspiracy theory” on massive spying. Even so, those who’ve lied to Congress (and thus the American people), Clapper, Alexander, and many Congress-critters who knew the truth but lied anyway….continue to lie and haven’t been even brought up on contempt of Congress.
Don’t people realize this mass spying means each and every person in any kind of command or office of power has a control file with all their dirt? Isn’t it clear how things got this bad in the U.S.?
We have a bifurcated system of justice in the U.S. and besides the rich/poor access to counsel part of it, seems to me the .1% decide which laws get enforced or not. Take for example on the higher end the fact no heads of finance have been indicted for fucking homeowners and investors; HSBC was let off the hook with just a fine for money laundering to terrorists and drug cartels (by Oblunder’s choice to replace Holder) and on the other end here we have tens of thousands of illegals in the U.S. taking American’s jobs and getting driver’s licenses even though they’ve broken the law by their mere presence here.
It will take a movement much stronger than Occupy to force change. And yes, I think at this point it WILL take force.