You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you’ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life.
–Rebecca Solnit, “Prometheus Among the Cannibals”
I kind of wanted to write an open letter to Edward Snowden in the vein of Rebecca Solnit’s “Prometheus Among the Cannibals,” but I figured my letter would be nothing more than a confessional, and I didn’t want to cheapen Solnit’s rhetorical approach. I have not taken the time I should to investigate the information that Snowden risked his life to release. And I have not taken the time to follow closely our own government’s response to Snowden’s actions. In some ways, I have failed as a citizen of this country because I have not taken advantage of the very access to information that is so important and that Snowden’s disclosures seek to protect.
Sure, I generally know about Snowden. He was a contractor who worked for the National Security Agency who disclosed documents and information to U.S. journalists about a massive U.S. surveillance program. And I know that he was forced to flee the U.S. and is now living in Russia, having been granted political asylum. But beyond that, most of the key elements of his revelations have slipped under my radar.
For instance, I did not know the following things:
- A U.S. government program called PRISM allows for anyone’s Yahoo or Gmail accounts to be accessed by government investigators.
- The NSA harvests e mail contact lists and runs a program called XKeyscore, which makes it possible for them to track virtually anything we do online.
- The U.S. military blocked access to The Guardian, one of the international news outlets that published many of Snowden’s leaked documents.
It is this last point that bothers me the most about the Edward Snowden saga because it represents the measures the U.S. military will take to control its own agenda. Fearful that the soldiers who are fighting in the “War on Terror” would discover reporting on Snowden and realize the incongruity between the “freedom” they are “fighting for” and the reality of U.S. surveillance and control of information, the Army put up network filter blocks on The Guardian for soldiers currently in Afghanistan and the Middle East region. The block was instituted in the name of national security. But it its truly Orwellian, and it drives home Snowden’s point: this country has to be predicated on the free access of information. And it has to be major media outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times that hold our government accountable.
I hope to continue to investigate the Edward Snowden case and connect it to other elements in this class. But for now, I am like Rebecca Solnit. I have a heavy heart because I think about the immensity of “the system” and how powerless one individual is within it. And I am sad because I think about the disparity between the vision of democracy set forth in the first amendment of the constitution and the reality of information access in 2014 America.