On Snowden And The Long Battle For Privacy

Edward Snowden wrote an impassioned piece in The New York Times on June 4, hailing what he deemed was a new world order ushered, in major part, by his revelation two years ago of the massive surveillance network put in place by the National Security Agency (NSA).

While working as an NSA contractor, Snowden came across PRISM, a clandestine surveillance programme run by the NSA, which collects private information of individuals from the Internet and phone companies. After 9/11, government security agencies were given sweeping powers to reform the intelligence-gathering framework. It was under these guidelines that PRISM was launched in 2007.

Snowden’s revelations made clear the extent of tapping into private lives under the garb of preventing terror. Worse for Americans, they realised that even they were under constant surveillance, not just evil foreigners.(Snowden has been living in exile in Russia since making the revelations to journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras in a Hong Kong hotel.)

In the NYT piece, Snowden brims with confidence of the changes brought about since those fretful days: “Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.’s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress. After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated.”

Ironically, on the very day the NYT published Snowden’s piece, the paper also reported on the increased NSA spying on the US border. “Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents,” the paper said.

The truth is the goalposts in the battle for privacy have indeed shifted. Last week President Obama signed a law that would prevent the NSA from collecting telephone calls between private individuals but allow Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) and other federal agencies to request meta data – data about data, including call numbers, timings and durations – from private telephone operators. Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which served as the legal basis for the telephone surveillance programme revealed by Snowden, expired on June 1. The next day, President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act.

While some Republicans have predictably decried the changes, saying they will restrict the capacity to counter terror, others have welcomed the move towards greater transparency in data access by government agencies.

The future will tell us the efficacy of the new measures, but Snowden’s gloating seems premature. At one level, all privacy is at stake in the technology-obsessed world we live in today. Our cellphones, gadgets and cameras are repositories of so much private information as to fill entire books. On the other hand, as the NYT hacking story reveals, Snowden’s PRISM revelations have entailed a scenario where the government has shown great alacrity in addressing phone tapping even as other intrusive programmes continue unabated.

There has been no comprehensive review of the American security set-up put in place after 9/11.

But besides all this, Snowden’s revelations and the broad-based support for his cause mask other pertinent issues. Snowden’s disclosures have focused an unrelenting gaze on the actions of the US federal government, couching the struggle for privacy as the fight for a fundamental, democratic good. While his work, in and of itself, is laudable, it offers only a limited example in the broader fight against privacy infringement. And while Snowden is right to claim credit for starting this conversation, the issue now needs to be looked at more holistically and address the realities of our world, where less democratic societies than America’s continue to not merely scuttle unrestricted online access but wage cyber warfare.

More, at the level of the private sector, the privacy of the individual is under threat. Consider the following events, all of which were reported last week:

On June 5, China was accused of a massive data breach involving the agency that handles security clearances and US government employee records.

1. Uber announced a new user policy that will let drivers track your location which the app runs in the background.
2. In a wide-ranging survey conducted by Pew, few Americans expressed confidence in the security of their data.

Clearly, things are not as rosy as Snowden paints. He ends his NYT piece with expressing happiness that “the balance of power is beginning to shift. We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason.”

Noble words, but ones that fail to capture the comprehensive reality of the threat to privacy and freedom in our fraught times.