The ongoing Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance have all sorts of implications for the rule of law, constitutional democracy, geopolitical alignments, human rights and much else.  The disclosures deserve our closest attention for these reasons alone.  But what do these revelations have to do with the commons?

If we regard the act of commoning as a genre of citizenship – acts of voluntary association and action that are critical to human freedom and democracy – we can see that snooping by both the NSA and its corporate brethren are profoundly hostile to the future of the commons.  They violate some fundamental notions of human rights, civil freedoms and the ability of individuals to protect their privacy and thus their sovereignty.

If the market/state apparatus can digitally monitor our reading habits and telephone calls, email correspondence and purchases, physical movements and much else, then it has effectively snuffed out the sovereignty of a free people. The barrage of the successive Snowden disclosures has been followed by a relentless government propaganda war, cable TV denunciations and even attacks on Greenwald by the liberal nomenklatura (Michael Kinsley, George Packer). It’s as if “respectable opinion” did not care to note or defend the elemental human freedoms that a functioning democracy requires.

It was such a pleasure therefore to (belatedly) encounter a series of four lectures delivered last fall by Eben Moglen, a law scholar and historian at Columbia Law School, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, and former general counsel of the Free Software Foundation.  The four talks — “Snowden and the Future” — offer one of the most eloquent and historically informed critiques of the Snowden revelations and their implications for freedom, democracy and – I would add – the capacity of people to common.

The lectures address the following themes:

•  What has Edward Snowden done to change the course of human history?
•  How does the evolution of surveillance since World War II threaten democracy?
•  What does it mean that information can be both so powerful and so easily spread? In a network embracing all of humanity, how does democracy survive our desire for security?

On this blog, I try to avoid venturing into topics that veer off-topic such as, say, national security politics or election campaigns.  But I make an exception in this case because the rise of state surveillance in collaboration with the corporate digital giants has enormous ramifications for the commons movement. The NSA’s routine and sweeping surveillance not only affects our potential to think and act as commoners by installing fear and self-censorship; it seeks to structurally and permanently lock in such profound unfreedom. It makes any bottom-up citizen initiative or commons subject to absolute government control, as enabled by absolute top-down control of the Internet and all communications infrastructures:  a totalitarian growth upon a nation that has fought and died for freedom.

Free software champions have long pointed out the enormous importance of free/libre/open source software – and digital commons more generally – as guarantors of basic human rights and freedoms.  Now the reality of these assertions has been vividly confirmed.

It is a treat to see a law scholar who clerked by Justice Thurgood Marshall and has defended legal software encryption, address the meaning of the Snowden disclosures. I will not attempt to summarize Moglen’s incisive, powerful commentary, but I will offer this excerpt as a taste, and encourage you to read the entire four lectures.  It’s a long read, but well worth it:

The power of that Roman Empire rested in its control of communications. The Mediterranean Sea, which was the transit hub of every western civilization, was their lake. And across their European empire, from Scotland to Syria, they pushed the roads—roads that fifteen centuries later were still primary arteries of European transportation. Down those roads which, as Gibbon says, rendered every corner of the Empire pervious to Roman power, the Emperor marched his armies. But up those roads he gathered his intelligence. Augustus invented the posts: first for signals intelligence, to move couriers and messages at the fastest possible speeds; and then for human intelligence. He created the post-chaises, so that, as Gibbon says, those who were present when dispatches were written could be questioned by the Emperor. Using that infrastructure for control of communications, with respect to everything that involved the administration of power, the Emperor of the Romans made himself the best informed human being in the history of the world.

That power eradicated human freedom. “Remember,” says Cicero to Marcellus in exile, “wherever you are, you are equally within of the power of conqueror.”

[…snip…]

Because of Mr. Snowden, we now know that the listeners, in their aggressive effort to maintain the security of the United States by breaking anything that stands in the way of listening, undertook to do what they repeatedly promised respectable opinion in the trade they would never do.

Systematically, they attempted what they had once and for all promised many a time in the discreetest but most credible fashion to respectable opinion, which then carried their water for them throughout our world. They always said they would not attempt breaking the crypto which secures the global financial system.

That was false.

When, on September 6th, the New York Times re-entered the pursuit of journalism in this area so triumphantly, by revealing the existence of Bull Run, publishing Mr. Snowden’s various disclosures concerning both the substance of Bull Run and the National Security Agency’s discussions of it, we learned that the United States listeners had been systematically and deliberately trying to subvert the crypto that holds the international financial system together, for years. And we learned a good deal more—which we shall spend more time upon on another evening, considering carefully what we learned in this respect—we learned that their efforts had been so far only partially successful.

Within hours they had forfeited respectable opinion around the world, which had stood solidly in their corner all the way along. The recklessness of what they had done, and the danger to which it put the people in the world who don’t accept danger from the United States Government, was breathtaking.

When the morality of freedom is so thoroughly thrown away, it isn’t only the “little people” of the world who suffer, but they do.

The empire of the United States, the one that secured itself by listening to everything, was the empire of exported liberty. What we had to offer all around the world was freedom—after colonization, after European theft, after the forms of twentieth-century horror we haven’t even talked about yet—we offered liberty; we offered freedom.

In the twentieth century we were prepared to sacrifice many of the world’s great cities, and to accept the sacrifice of tens of millions of human lives, in order to secure our selves against forms of government we called “totalitarianism,” in which the State grew so powerful and so invasive that it recognized no longer any border of private life, and brought itself into everything that its subjects did. Where the State listened to every telephone conversation, and kept a list of everybody every troublemaker knew.

So let us unfortunately tell the truth as it appeared to the people who worked in the system: When the morality of freedom was withdrawn, our State began fastening the procedures of totalitarianism on the substance of democratic society.

There is no historical precedent for the proposition that the procedures of totalitarianism are compatible with the system of enlightened, individual, democratic self-governance. No one has ever previously in the history of the human race evolved an argument—and as I will show next time no argument can be evolved—that would give us any confidence in the ability of the procedures of totalitarianism to coexist with those of constitutional democratic self-governance. It is enough to say for now that omnipresent invasive listening creates fear. And I need not be Justice Brandeis to tell you that fear is the enemy of reasoned, ordered liberty.

Here are the four parts of the Moglen lectures, available in video, audio and print formats:

I.  Westward the Course of Empire 

II.  Oh, Freedom 

III.  The Union, May it Be Preserved 

IV.  Freedom’s Future 

Originally published at bollier.org

The post Eben Moglen: “Snowden and the Future” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A very recent, stirring essay, written by Jérémie Zimmermann, co founder of Quadrature du la Net and originally published in Mediapart.

“Fortunately, Edward Snowden also showed us a pathway out. Governments can maybe made accountable, and mass surveillance can surely be evaded, and made much more costly. By moving away from technology that controls us, we can use, promote and develop technology that makes us more free. It is a long path, requiring efforts, to break away with the habits and the blind trust we placed in the Machine, and requiring an appropriation of technology by everyone. Through the use of free software, decentralized architectures and end-to-end encryption, we can –probably– take back control of the Machine.”

One year ago, Edward Snowden’s revelations make us learn and understand how our relationship to technology has changed forever, and how the trust we place in machines shall never be the same. Edward Snowden also shows us a path for taking back control of the machines, an urgent task that no one today can ignore. By Jéremie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.

© Caption by Terminator Studies

One year ago day by day, a courageous young man named Edward Snowden sacrificed most of his life and his freedoms to show us the crude reality of the world we are living in. His ongoing revelations make us learn and understand how our relationship to technology has changed forever, and how the trust we place in machines shall never be the same. Edward Snowden also shows us a path for taking back control of the machines, an urgent task that no one today can ignore.

We live already in the era of the Cyborg. Our Humanities are practically indistinct from the Machine. Functions of our bodies such as communicating, remembering, recognizing each other, our personal and shared memories and most of our works are now indivisible from the functions of the machines.

Computers, phones and servers are all interconnected through software and communication networks. This global interconnected Machine is increasingly merging with our global interconnected humanity – soon on faces, wrists and under the skin – and so far most of us trusted it with about everything.

Yet in the era of the Cyborg, what we see thanks to Ed Snowden is that this global Machine has been turned as a whole against us. It has been turned as a tool for global surveillance and for control of individuals, at the cost of massive violations of our fundamental rights. With many abuses already demonstrated, the Machine bears an immense, horrendous, potential for abuse and repression, from political to economic espionage. Any political movement, any revolution, any idea could potentially be crushed in a snap.

The Machine as a whole has been repurposed. From obeying us, its users, its owners, it has been reprogrammed to obey its real masters, comprised of an ill-defined alliance of some of the biggest companies in the world such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, of unaccountable spying agencies such as the NSA, GHCQ or the DGSE, and of thousands of their private or public partners (among which a myriad of private contractors and at least 950.000 US citizens cleared with a Top Secret clearance).

Many of us still find more comfortable to ignore the truth than to change their habits. Perhaps truth is so violent and scary that it becomes too difficult to admit. Perhaps the gap between reality and comfortable illusions is too big.

Still, we have an immense responsibility to ask ourselves questions that will shape the future of our societies, our relationship to power, as well as our relationships between individuals. Where is the boundary between our humanities and the Machine? Did we consciously accept it as it is? How can we take back control of that Machine, which is now part of ourselves?

What is at stake is the very definition of our humanities. For massive surveillance implies violation and potential annihilation of our intimacies, these spaces where we decide, in full trust –alone or with others– to be truly ourselves, to experiment with ourselves, to develop new ideas and theories, to write, sing and create. In these spaces we develop our identities, our very definitions of who we are…

Fortunately, Edward Snowden also showed us a pathway out. Governments can maybe made accountable, and mass surveillance can surely be evaded, and made much more costly. By moving away from technology that controls us, we can use, promote and develop technology that makes us more free. It is a long path, requiring efforts, to break away with the habits and the blind trust we placed in the Machine, and requiring an appropriation of technology by everyone. Through the use of free software, decentralized architectures and end-to-end encryption, we can –probably– take back control of the Machine.

It is our duty as a civilisation and as individuals. We must fight this Machine of oppression by all means, before it is too late, in order to reconquer and reclaim our humanity.

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