To See, or Not to See

The debate between those who think constitutional liberty is paramount, and those who think that whatever else it might be, the constitution cannot be a “suicide pact”, will probably never be settled. But the power of Snowden’s beautifully written, engrossing memoir, full of pithy formulations, is that he does not deal with this question purely abstractly: liberty or national security? Rather, he attempts to portray a chilling picture of the world we create in the name of national security.

Snowden is not a security dove or an anarchist. He is driven to public service by a commitment to national security. The attack of 9/11 shakes him out of complacency and drives him to enlist in the army, where after gruelling physical injuries he decides to serve the state by using his formidable computer talents. But he finds out that it is the abuse of the idea of national security, not an excessive concern for privacy or liberty, that is converting the constitution into a suicide pact. While 9/11 was the loss of one kind of innocence, it created a sense of fear. But the discovery of what a programme like XKeyscore can do is another, perhaps even deeper, loss of innocence: the dispossession of human dignity that surveillance represents, and one we license in the name of that fear.

Snowden’s concerns artfully proceed in three linked but different registers. Each is wonderfully braided into Snowden’s own life: his transformation from a geeky, straightforward, inventive, slightly asocial computer whizkid born into a military family, to a political rebel who also finds the love of his life. The story is touchingly told in just the right register, and along the way manages to shed light on a rich assortment of topics. It does effectively bear witness to our times.

In a key moment in the book, Snowden writes: “I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialled a phone or touched a computer.” No one is immune from this panoptic surveillance: not dozens of heads of state, not the innocent child in Indonesia who accidentally pops up on Snowden’s screen. But, you might protest, is this surveillance not necessary for security? What risks does it pose? There is the harm to principles and values: such surveillance is unauthorised and unconstitutional; it violates liberty and privacy. But the stronger and more powerful register is the historical one: think not of what rights of surveillance states might have, but how they actually behave. Let us for a moment grant that states have these extensive rights. Let us grant that no leader in the world can, in good conscience, step away from the pull of the question: are you doing all you can to protect your citizens? Snowden’s argument seems to be: that is not what the state is doing.

The persuasiveness of Snowden’s appeal hinges on the larger conduct of the state: do you trust a state that unleashes wars that kill close to a million people, in response to 9/11? Would you trust a state whose political economy seems to be driven by a shadowy world, that Snowden inhabits, of contractors, subcontractors and private parties? Would you trust a state where lying is not an occasional tool of choice, but a default mode of governance? The issue is not security, it is the lack of accountability — it is not surveillance per se, but concentration of power. This is the terrain on which the pushback against Snowden might come. Were the checks and balances as broken as Snowden thinks they are? The state could potentially harm any American citizen. But how many were actually harmed?

Snowden is puzzled by what modern surveillance does to the individual. He rightly points out that even the act of being seen in an unauthorised manner, even if you have nothing to hide, is something of a violation. It is giving over the power of defining yourself to someone else. We will be defined, not as we choose to but as the state and private entities decode us through our metadata. We also became more vicarious, intruding on moments in other people’s lives that are not our own. But there is a deeper concern: as everything about us is potentially colonised by the imperatives of state power or commercial needs, what we are left with is a wholesale instrumentalisation of the self, where every action, every gesture, every thought ends up serving the logic of mammon or the state. Privacy is not about the wish to hide; it is about having a space which is truly one’s own, where we are not instruments of someone else’s purposes.

The memoir is disappointingly thin in some respects: there is often an appearance of a lack of self-doubt about his own convictions, of too little wrestling with how much harm he might cause with the revelations. The narrative simply peters out after the revelations are made and he reaches Hong Kong. But even Snowden’s detractors will admit, this is a memoir that shows great dignity: the coming of age story of someone who went from thinking that “the geek shall inherit the earth” to realising, “Technology does not take a Hippocratic Oath.” Neither, it seems, does the All Knowing State. Whether Snowden is a patriot or a traitor, or possibly both, time will tell.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express