We live in a time of unprecedented communicative possibility. Data can be transmitted at tremendous rates. As soon as anyone seeks to make use of the vast new potential, though, to share information that threatens the status quo, that person is silenced, persecuted, vilified.
So Bradley Manning is sentenced to 35 years for releasing documents about American war crimes through wiki-leaks. Snowden is living abroad to avoid prosecution for releasing information about NSA abuses through the Guardian and still, every time a new investigative committee is proposed, politicians tell us that sunlight is the best disinfectant before they get to work in their closed-door meetings.
I’m not a fan of secrecy. I think secrecy and lies are, in fact, detrimental to Democracy at the most basic level. If we, the people, are responsible for making decisions that are vital to our nation, we should be equipped with all the information necessary to make those decisions. Even in a democratic republic like ours, where we make only the decisions as to who will make the decisions, knowing what is actually going on might be useful.
When secrets are kept or lies are told, a subtle form of fascism becomes the norm. Those with power – in this case power in the form of knowledge – limit the information provided to the voters, thus undermining the ability of the constituency to make fully investigated decisions. Important choices, therefore, are manipulated to serve those in power, and only appear to be made by the public. It gets worse, though. When the secrets being kept are the exact extent to which the public is being monitored and controlled, but there is a general acceptance of the idea that this is going on, self-censorship sneaks into the zeitgeist unnoticed. The idea that government agencies MIGHT be listening in, prevents people from having open discussions of topics they fear might get them in trouble. Muslims might fear discussing their faith over the phone. Those who support single-payer health care guard their words so as to avoid being called socialists, even if some form of socialism is what they ultimately hope to see. Peace activists fear that e-mails, instant messages and texts might be used to declare them enemies of the state, abettors of an enemy and by association terrorists.
Of course, now that we know the NSA has been collecting only meta-data and not content, perhaps we can all breathe a little more easily, talk a little more freely. Maybe what the NSA is unhappy about is not that Snowden and his allies in the media revealed how much data is being collected but rather that they revealed how little actual information is being gleaned. As long as we didn’t know exactly what was happening, we didn’t know how much privacy we could hope to have.
Over the past few decades a misguided quest for illusory security in a dangerous world has led us all into a bizarre topiary labyrinth of logic so twisted, that we do not see the switchbacks even as we follow them.
You want an example of this?
You can bet that as people are arrested for exercising their right to free speech, they are reminded of their right to remain silent.