I was watching today an interview to Edward Snowden on TED 2014, Vancouver. It is very interesting to hear this man, who is such a controversial figure today, talk about why he did what he did.
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American computer specialist, former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and former contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA). He came to international attention when he disclosed thousands of classified documents to several media outlets. The leaked documents revealed operational details of global surveillance programs run by the NSA and the other Five Eyes governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with the cooperation of a number of businesses and European governments.
In the interview (which he did from Russia via a telepresence robot which was moving around on stage), he talked about the importance of privacy in the internet era, and how this privacy and this control over what you disclose to others is the basis for personal and group freedom and one of the founding blocks of democracy.
Edward Snowden
Internet is indeed one of the greates inventions of the second half of the 20th century, it is almost a cry of hope in a world that is constantly divided and shaken by war and hatred. To me, at least, it is a great tool that brings humanity together in ways we couldn't have dreamed of a few years ago. Now, here living in the Netherlands, I can talk to my family on the other side of the planet in (almost) real time, I can see their faces and they can see mine. I can read about things I didn't know existed, I can learn to write in Japanese if I want, or to cook a paella, or share my music with millions of people in countries I have never been to.
Internet, to me, is the way we have found to finally fulfill our need for connectedness, to finally feel that, despite being such tiny beings in such a big world, we can come together and do something. At least, this, to me, is the ideal of the internet, to have the capability as a species to share information, to share knowledge, to know each other, to become one big family in this forsaken rock that floats around an unfathomable space.
As I understand it, this is the ideal Snowden and others like him are fighting for: a real interconnected world without fear.
But of course there are always those people that have power and are afraid to lose it. People that have taken what they have unfairly from others, and that know that the power they have over us is only based on fear and lies. They seek to control and to repress humanity in order to keep their positions as leadres of this world. I'm not taking about a secret conspiracy or anything, but about governments of influencial countries, big companies that control huge sectors of the market. Maybe there is no brainwashing, or anything, but there is a surveilance, there is a lack of privacy in the internet that wasn't there before, or at least that shouldn't at all be there. I agree with what Mikko Hypponen says here about surveilance: it is indeed sometimes necessary, but in most of the cases it is not, it just constitutes a violation of my rights as a user of the internet and as a human being.
As I see it, Edward Snowden has, in a way, become a symbol of this fight for internet rights. He is no longer himself, but the voice of a humanity that is asking the governments to change, to be more aware of the people that elected them, to know that they have no power over us if we don't give it to them, to know that we do have rights and that we are not willing to sacrifice them in the name of some abstract entity like the war on terrorism.
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