Privacy vs. Protection

Edward Snowden is hiding out somewhere in Hong Kong after telling the world about how the government can check on your online activities. Can’t everyone do the same thing? The Internet is public. Snowden’s PowerPoint presentation of all this has all the earmarks of a James Bond MI5, or a CIA, or KBG (or whatever it’s modern equivalent is) the FBI, etc. He says he thinks of himself as a spy. Snowden in fact worked for the CIA.

It is perfectly true that the government can collect all that data about you for your entire lifetime, just like other governments can and businesses to in order to market their products to you more effectively. It is the 21^st century all that is possible and all that is happening.

Snowden is a 29-year-old computer whiz kid who chose to make public details of the National Security Agency data collection programs. He made big bucks, $200,000/year, doing those very things. He decided this was an invasion into private lives by the government. Some think he is a hero others think he is a traitor; but he did break the law and decided his conscience; his standards of ethics were superior to the government’s. I admire an individual thinker who stands for the public good at the expense of personal benefit. John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage is all about that and he depicted true heroes in our country’s life. Snowden, I’m not so sure; maybe he is just a plain egotistical dude that should have finished high school and taken some classes in ethics along with his community college computer courses.

He said he went to Hong Kong for treatment of epilepsy apparently leaving his girlfriend behind in Hawaii. He thinks Hong is a good place for him because of the free speech tradition. You may make of that what you will. He apparently sees little difference between China hacking us and we hacking them.

Snowden votes but has not registered with either party but he did give$500 to libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul last year.

Congressional leaders have mixed reactions and the White House is pretty mute. But it is clear with his security clearance he was to protect classified material, which he obviously didn’t.

What Snowden does show is misgivings about the integrity of the government and fears what they might do with information about citizens if they want to “get you.” He does not see himself as anymore of a criminal than the government.

For his interview with the Guardian and his reasoning go here 

For a New Yorker article saying he is a hero go here 

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My take on all of this is that the United States the 21^st century is a far cry from the from the country of our Founding Fathers and Mothers. The thirteen colonies likely had a population of about 2 ½ million people compared to our 316 million today in our 50 states. The first census was done in 1790 and listed 3,929,326 people including an estimated 697,681 slaves.

In a small agrarian world with small town and villages, there is a lot of self-monitoring going on. If one does not live up to the standard customs, mores and laws, they are known and brought to task for their deviant ways; some of which we would not want to practice today.

But in today’s world we mostly live in large cities and have a great deal of anonymity. You can live next to an axe murder and not have a clue. A major problem our society faces is anomie, a state of normlessness. We have become so multi-cultured that there is no “American way.” That has good aspectsand bad.

But the point is, in a vast normless culture with little knowledge of our neighbors (the internet just intensifies that separation between people), we have to give up more and more personal freedoms to insure our common safety. Terrorists have access to all those things Snowden eschews and we need protection from that knowledge. We may not like the loss of anonymity and invasion of personal information, but we give them up of necessity.

The truth is you just can’t hid yourself very well any more, and in some ways because of this giving up of personal information we are more like our forbearers in 1776, it is just a different form.