Over the past few months, millions of Americans have discovered that their government is willing and able to spy on them as well as on the populations of other countries. This comes as a surprise to many.
For the nearly 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the majority of Americans have enjoyed strong legal supports of our civil liberties. We have lived with Constitutional amendments and legal requirements for due process designed to bar or at least curtail undue search, seizure, surveillance and other intrusions on our persons, property and privacy. These rights were perceived as congruent with our most basic tenet, that we are all equal, that no one has the right to intercept our emails, or invade our privacy other than with a legally obtained warrant, obtainable only after establishing probable cause. Many of us had come to believe that these protections were ironclad and non-negotiable.
But at some point unnoticed, or simply obscured by the fog of over a dozen years of the War on Terror, the rules changed. Our confidence that we enjoy inalienable rights to privacy is evaporating. Although every once and a while we are made aware of secret executive orders, directives and programs that delimit our civil liberties, it’s still unclear how we lost so much so fast.
As for the source of our most recent enlightenment – the reason we now know what we didn’t know – we have Edward Snowden to thank. A computer programmer and government contractor, Snowden snagged a motherlode of highly confidential U.S. documents and hightailed it first to Hong Kong and then to Russia. He is wanted by the U.S. government. As of this writing, he is in the third month of a one-year asylum granted by the Russian government.
By doing what he did, he leapt through the whistleblower’s portal into the same or similar existential limbo occupied by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and former U.S. Army officer Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning). The documents Snowden leaked detail U.S. National Security Agency surveillance programs.
The past months have witnessed wave after wave of stunning revelations on the extraordinary scope of U.S. surveillance and spying. Everything’s been tapped or monitored: tens of millions of phone calls in Europe; the seemingly unassailable email and social network services offered by tech giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo; the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It looks like the goal of these NSA programs is to devour all global communications down to the last byte, to watch everything and everyone, and to build and refine an all-seeing surveillance system that will bring to a definitive close the era in which we assumed our right to privacy.
As the scope of surveillance continues to be unveiled, a lot has been said about Orwell’s novel, 1984. In that dystopian story, human society has reached a bleak nadir wherein men, women and children struggle under an overwhelmingly invasive, all-knowing authority. People live in fear that they might be arrested for their words, their actions and even non-compliant thoughts (transgressions known as “thoughtcrimes”). But a recent reaction to one of Snowden’s revelations by the Obama administration has convinced me that we should also look for guidance and portents to another of Orwell’s classics: Animal Farm.
Animal Farm is about a community of farm animals who eject their drunk and incompetent human master and work together to build a utopian community based on a list of agreed-upon rules. The most important rule is “All animals are equal”.
Over time, the pigs come to dominate the horses, cows and other animals. They hoard privileges and luxuries – such as the milk from the cows – for themselves. They lie, deceive and gradually change the rules until they have subjugated all of the other animals. They resort to murder. By the end, the pigs walk, talk, drink and act like the humans they once overthrew. In the dismal dystopia at the book’s end the only rule that remains is, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Animal Farm is fueled by Orwell’s disillusionment with the Bolshevik Revolution. It is a book energized by outrage at the betrayal of passionately held ideals. For my money, and based purely on aesthetics, Animal Farm is a better book than 1984. Whereas 1984 could be improved by some editing and cutting (lopping off a third of the 300-plus pages would be a start), Animal Farm comes in at a lean and durable 140 pages in the Signet paperback edition.
The fact that it is a fable and an allegory involving farm animals only adds to its power. It’s a riveting story, the kind of thing kids can and do enjoy, and yet it packs a doozy of a payload. It conveys in a brilliantly conceived and edifying tale one of the most important lessons of human history and our ongoing efforts to build sustainable frameworks for communities and governance. Simply put, it teaches us that power corrupts.
Comparisons aside, Animal Farm and 1984 do complement one another. An ingenious aspect of 1984 is that we never find out much about who’s doing all the watching. How did they bring society under such total control? Animal Farm could be seen as the subversive creation myth to the society depicted in 1984. It could be seen as a kind of fanciful prequel. In 1984, the ties that bind society are so compromised and perverted that children betray their parents. Animal Farm could be the bedtime story that a treasonous mother or father might tell a child they trusted if that child asked, “Why do we live this way?”
The turn of events that made me think of Animal Farm after months of dwelling on 1984 was this: The Obama administration has been cagey and elusive regarding the NSA leaks for months. There have been no strong denials, only vague assurances that it looks bad but it’s not that bad and it isn’t what we think it is, etc, etc. We have gotten more details about how our privacy has been compromised – the mechanics of it – from executives of Google and Yahoo than from our own government.
Yet the news that the U.S. had spied on Angela Merkel’s private phone conversations since 2003 sent the Obama Administration into a revealing frenzy of hand wringing and chagrin. Clearly this was embarrassing. Reports and analyses focused on the close, warm bond shared by President Obama and Chancellor Merkel. Of course such a bond could be damaged by news that the U.S. had been spying on Merkel’s private conversations for years.
A <a href="http://www.chinapost navigate to this site.com.tw/editorial/taiwan-issues/2013/11/02/392625/Spying-on.htm” onclick=”__gaTracker(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘outbound-article’, ‘http://www.chinapost.com.tw/editorial/taiwan-issues/2013/11/02/392625/Spying-on.htm’, ‘November 2 article in The China Post’);”>November 2 article in The China Post notes that “Obama is reportedly mulling further moves to ban spying on all allied heads of state.” Obama’s very specific, focused response to Merkel’s fit of pique is dismaying for all sorts of reasons and begs the question: why her? The logics of geopolitics and diplomacy notwithstanding, why should she be extended a privilege – a right – that has been stripped from the American people and everyone else on Earth who has a cellphone and an email account?
As the China Post article suggests, there’s a possibility that this is just an ingenuous ruse, a theater of affront meant to distract millions of people into thinking that these two allies and global powers won’t continue to collaborate on and refine the systems of surveillance on which they and other allies have already invested billions of dollars.
But if these gestures and statements aren’t disingenuous, if this really is an earnest effort to set up some standard of exception regarding who gets watched and who doesn’t, then Obama’s response follows the pattern that Animal Farm warns us about. A privileged few – let’s call them the 0.000000001% – are claiming, at least symbolically, the basic human right to privacy. They are claiming it to share amongst themselves exclusively. They are hoarding the right to privacy. Meanwhile, the rest of us, the remaining 99.99999999% of the human population, can kiss that right goodbye.
Maneuvers like this, done as they are in secrecy and subterfuge, should be seen for what they are. These are bald, unequivocal abuses of power. Plus, they’re more than likely illusory. Surveillance of the type the West has set on is all consuming. Anyone who believes that they can watch and remain unwatched will enjoy a delusional and Pyrrhic power. But the sentiment expressed – to create an exception for an elite – is proof that a few are willing to deny a fundamental right to the overwhelming majority, and it’s alarming. It undermines democracy. Unchecked, we may find ourselves descending into a world wherein, to paraphrase Orwell, all human beings should enjoy the right to privacy, but some believe they enjoy it more than others.
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