Torches and Snow Houses

A few weeks ago, after a high-heat session hashing out a data governance/ lineage offering at work, a teammate shared material from Edward Snowden's interview by Prof Lawrence Lessig with me. It made for truly sombre reading. Watching the documentary Citizenfour (which premiered in the same month) yesterday was a grim reminder not merely of the profound moral-legal issues involved, but also of the question of what, if anything, has society learned from the sordid disclosures and consequent debate.

First off, public memory is arguably impaired by information gaps regarding what Snowden actually exposed. Mainstream media mostly reduced the 2013 leaks to personal gossip, political theatre, and character assassination. Its occasional stirring into thriller-like coverage of Snowden's whereabouts or asylum attempts was also as predictable as it was puerile. The terrifying reality of mass citizen surveillance, which was core to the episode, was almost entirely ignored.

The fact remains that l' affaire Snowden deserves examination through multiple lenses. The legal, moral, political, and organizational perspectices are obvious, but the precipitating action was technological. In fact, advances in information technology enabled the Orwellian surveillance just as much as they paved the path for its eventual exposure. Furthermore, this was not an isolated example: infotech advancements have dramatically outpaced our legal and ethical framework in the last few years. No lesson is enough, for we continue to lack the muscle to foresee and mitigate the risks of such revolutions.

Going back to Snowden, it must be acknowledged that there are two fundamental dilemmas (lines of morality and legality blur here) at play. First, at a policy level, is the balancing act between prevention of public harm and invasion of privacy. The vision of Big Brother run amok is not just conspiracy theory fodder. Equally, it is difficult to guarantee civil liberty without the protective cover of public policy, which almost directly implies the enforcement power of a benign regime. As such, a balance is expected to be provided by internal checks, legislative oversight, judicial review, and Fourth Estate scrutiny. This framework assumes no information asymmetry, however, and is increasingly strained by an inherent bias, namely, one that results from a sustained global rise in threat frequency, disruption severity, and adversarial sophistication.

The second ethical conundrum is personal and, one would think, integral to whistleblowing. Many would find no fault in the NSA's use of PRISM under a means-justify-ends logic. For them, loyalty to one's employer and commitment to a hallowed mandate (perhaps even a premonition of vituperative consequences), should have weighed heavily against Snowden. Yet, he acted under an overriding, good-faith obligation to shine a light on these surveillance practices. He evidently recognized his duty as being beholden to the nation at large, not merely to its instruments of state. Defining the 'common good' is a slippery slope, of course, and causes one to pause before becoming overly celebratory of Snowden's stance.

Finally, there is the perspective of consequences. If one were to characterize Snowden's actions as Gandhian civil disobedience (conscience-driven, non-violent, public action), then he undeniably shook the State out of its complacency. From Obama on down, the polity was compelled to attend to policy deficiencies, including reform at the NSA itself. As for Snowden, the price of valuing integrity and a high sense of morality, enormous as it may be, was only waiting to be paid. History will be the eventual arbiter, but this is the seeming cost to keep the spirit of deliberative democracy alive.