CNN: Ed Snowden - Human Hero Intervenes on Machine Logic

When I was a kid, I remember a guy named Daniel Ellsberg leaking some classified documents to the New York Times about the Vietnam War called “the Pentagon Papers.” When the whistleblower finally stood trial for espionage, my parents weren’t quite sure how to feel. But when Richard Nixon’s crew was revealed to have been conducting illegal wiretaps in an effort to discredit the former intelligence contractor, well, they were outraged and decided Ellsberg was a hero. So did the judge and most of America. 

I wonder if Ed Snowden - the 29-year-old Booz Allen Hamilton employee behind last week’s series of leaks about NSA surveillance on the American public - will be rewarded with the same admiration. You’d think we would be even more outraged by what he uncovered than we were by the surveillance of Ellsberg. After all, it’s not just one lone loose cannon being wiretapped here, it’s all of us. 

Snowden has not uncovered a human conspiracy here, but the workings of the machine itself. And it’s a machine that really does require some human intervention. 

In the coming months I expect a campaign to be waged against this young man that will make the one against Ellsberg look like child’s play. His enemies have the full force of the machine - every email he’s written and every phone call he’s made - to use against him. This won’t be pretty. But before we decide that Snowden was smiling too much in his videotaped interview with The Guardian, earned too much money, or somehow betrayed his lovely girlfriend in Hawaii in a personal vendetta against his former bosses at the intelligence agencies, let’s take just a moment to consider his particularly human act of heroism. 

There are dozens, if not hundreds of government employees and contractors who have long been aware of the NSA's total surveillance effort. As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switches they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers, or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our emails by intelligence agencies. I always begged them to write about it, or to let me do so while protecting their identities. They refused to come forward, and believed my efforts to shield them would be futile. “I don’t want to lose my security clearance. Or my freedom,” one told me. 

Snowden was willing to take those risks and, I daresay, more. 

Yet it wasn’t just fear keeping people from talking about the growing cyber-surveillance state, but a sense of inevitability. This is just how technology evolves - at least when it’s uncontested. Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data. 

In such an environment, it’s hard to come down too hard on government intelligence officers who want to get in on this action. Our leaders are suffering from what I call “present shock” - the overwhelming assault of multiple threats from everywhere at the same time, amplified by technology of all sorts. Terrorists have unprecedented access to weapons of mass destruction, and work through decentralized networks around the clock. As data-gathering tools emerge with ever-increasing ability to keep tabs on the world’s communications, how can an overburdened intelligence agency choose otherwise than to exploit their potential? 

The rush to employ technology has become automatic. 

We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there’s an incoming message, and check our email even when we’d best pay attention to what’s going on around us in the real world. We text while driving. Likewise, without conscious restraint, government agencies can’t help but let the growing power of big data draw them into evermore invasive forms of surveillance on a population whose members simply must include those who intend harm on the rest. This is just how everything runs when it's left on "default" settings. 

Yet if we let the evolution of our machines dictate the evolution of our policy, the only possible result is what Snowden calls “turnkey tyranny.” 

As I have argued in other contexts, the best weapon against the paralysis of technologically induced present shock is human intervention. Just as we the people stood against the structural tyranny of an overreaching monarchy, it is we the people who must stand against the structural tyranny of runaway technology. 

Ed Snowden is a hero because he realized that our very humanity was being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe. Unlike those around him, who were too absorbed in their task to reflect on their actions and pause in their pursuit of digital omniscience, Snowden allowed himself to be “disturbed” by what he was doing. More in the midst of technology than most of us will ever be, Snowden disengaged for long enough to be human, and to consider the impact of what he was helping to build. He pressed pause.

Thank heavens our intelligence agencies are staffed by people like Snowden, not robots. People can still think. 

That’s why they call it intelligence.

End of Democracy: NSA and Present Shock

Here's my short closing keynote for day one at PDF 2013. The NSA story was buzzing on my phone as I walked to the stage. 

CNN: NSA phone snooping, a new kind of creepy

I'm finding hard to get too worked up over yesterday's revelation that the National Security Agency has been authorized by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect all our call data from Verizon. Hasn't everyone already assumed this? Everything we do in the digital realm - from surfing the web to sending an email to conducting a credit card transaction to, yes, making a phone call - creates a data trail. And if that trail exists, chances are someone is using it - or will be soon enough. 

This particular style of privacy invasion looks a bit different from those old TV movies where FBI agents sit in a van listening in on phone calls and recording them on reel-to-reel tape recorders. The government isn't interested in the content of our phone calls - our conversations - so much as who is calling whom and when, or what has become known as "meta-data."  Your life and pursuits are less important than the statistical profile of the way you use your digital devices. This is the world of big data.

I remember the days when talking about such possibilities was considered conspiracy theory or paranoia. Many of us imagined a future in which people would be planted with chips that monitor our conversations and whereabouts. Perhaps we'd even accept such tagging voluntarily, if it meant being able to track down our children in the unlikely event of a kidnapping. But such extraordinary measures proved unnecessary; we're all walking around with tracking devices in our pockets, which are capable not simply of broadcasting our phone calls but our physical locations, our movements, our interests - and then to tie all this data to our consumer profiles, credit histories…everything. 

Yes, it's still creepy, but it's a different kind creepy than it appears. Big data analysis works by identifying patterns and anomalies in our behavior. Nobody cares about the reasons why certain people do certain things. They only need to be able to predict the future. Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us. 

The only way for them to identify the kinds of statistical anomalies that point to a terror candidate is to have a giant database of all those behavior patterns that don't suggest imminent violence. What is different about the Tsarnaev brothers patterns of telephone usage from that of every other young male Chechnyan immigrants? You need both sets of data to figure that out. We are not the targets so much as the control group. 

Of course that's small comfort to a people who have long valued and assumed some measure of privacy from government observation. The American assumption of privacy allows those of us who do break certain laws - say, smoking pot or prostitution - from the fear of selective enforcement if we happen to be personal or political enemies of those in charge. As recent IRS scandals prove, our most trusted agencies are not above targeted investigations of ideological foes. 

The harder truth to accept is that we are moving into a digital reality where the assumption of privacy must be exchanged for an assumption of observation. Our telephone metadata is just the tip of the iceberg. Sure, President Obama was quick to respond to the surprise discovery of his administration's covert surveillance operation, promising Americans that the leaked document describes the full extent of this technological intrusion on our privacy. But this court order was already "top secret". Had it not been uncovered, its provisions would have been denied as well. 

My own friends in the digital telephony and networking industries have long told me about "splitters" at all major communications companies, through which every data signal can be observed and diverted. Other technicians have told me about giant server farms in Virginia and Utah, where all of our digital data - including encrypted emails and our phone calls - is being stored. No, they don't have the technological ability or legal authority to search this tremendous repository of data (if it really exists). But they may at some point in the future.  

Besides, the lack of court orders authorizing a particular style of surveillance don't stop any of this surveillance from happening. They simply make any information collected inadmissible in a court of law. Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it - whatever the laws we happen to know about might say. 

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted emails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on primetime television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon. 

Does this excuse our government's behavior? Of course not. But the silver lining here is that this digital transparency cuts both ways. No sooner does the government win a court order to spy on us than the digital trail of that court order is discovered and leaked to the press. The government's panicky surveillance of Associated Press reporters and disproportionate prosecution of Wikileaks participants lays bare its own inability to contend with the transparency of digital communications. 

It is disheartening and disillusioning to realize that our government knows every digital thing we say or do. But now, at least we know they know. 

Present Shock- explained in 15 minutes

I like this very brief talk I did for PSFK about Present Shock. It doesn't explain the whole book, but it definitely conveys the "gist" of it, in presentist style. See what I mean:

Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock. When Everything Happens Now from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

Present Shock Blows Stephen Colbert's Mind

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