(Opinion article published by Manuel Benet in Valencia’s local newspaper on 2nd July 2013)
The documents leaked by Edward Snowden to The Guardian on a sophisticated global intelligence are, in essence, nothing new. For years has been known that the U.S. and some partners share the ECHELON spy network, involved in the past in several trade scandals. However, we should not underestimated Snowden contribution. While so far the details of the spy system of the National Security Agency (NSA, for short) were based on experts research, we know now not only that this program (PRISM) is larger, intelligent and more ambitious than anything we thought in the past, but that many countries have their own surveillance systems.
Perhaps due to films or literature we have always been accustomed to the fact that espionage is made between States, with objectives and specific actors under certain rules. However, it has now taken a step forward, with the monitoring and recording of any information that could be virtually recorded of millions of individuals around the planet: a system without control or limit that breaks with total impunity and the cooperation of the Internet corporations any idea of freedom, privacy and justice we might have. States have come to spy on its citizens in a move more typical of dictatorships than democracies.
However, despite the seriousness of the matter, no one seems very concerned; do not expect a massive desertion from social network and if we look at the press, Snowden is famous for not having disclosed a large number of documents classified about a global and massive surveillance program, but by the geopolitical tensions that his flight and persecution have created between the U.S. and China and Russia mostly.
Says one of the quotes attributed to Benjamin Franklin that those willing to sacrifice some of their essential liberty for some security deserve neither one nor the other. This seems to be our case. It’s been a long time ago since —despite the great efforts (maybe not always so great, ok) of the data protection agencies both national and transnational— we decided that our privacy had not, at last and after all, the importance they wanted us to think. Made that decision, the transition of our information to a digital world controlled by multinational corporations outside national and European requirements posed no trauma at all.
At first glance there is a big difference between your messages being scrutinized by a nest of spies like the NSA, an opaque entity key in the American intelligence, and knowing that Google scans your emails to position relevant ads. However, there is no such difference: (almost) no one cares about we being spied upon; that is a simple inconvenience that we have taken as inherent of the digital age and something makes me think that we do not even needed the Damocles Sword of terrorism. The saying that goes that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, has been assumed almost by obligation with few complains.
We can draw one last thought. Edward Snowden was not 007; he had no license to kill and it was not (that we know) a double agent. It was ‘only’ a system administrator working for a NSA provider, one of the world’s safest organizations. From there he had access to a huge volume of classified documents that James Bond would not even have heard of. In light of this, do we really know who access our information?
