Snowden warned towards the end of his book – a mere action of purchasing or borrowing this book, could immediately mark you as a person of interest to the surveillance system. A chilling realization upon finishing the book was Snowden was not exaggerating – this makes me hesitant writing a review on this book. But this issue is too important to go uninformed.
Snowden shared his life experiences that formed his ideas, and those ideas are more powerful viewed in context than summarized here in abstract for book review. So please read the book in full, there is no substitute.
His ideas on surveillance :
• Snowden explained his principle, by pointing out the constitution especially the bill of rights was designed to make the life of law enforcement more DIFFICULT, not easier. The constitution was designed to protect the individual against state/government violence. This design was that power and legitimacy come from the individual, individuals giving the government a right to do things. Power does not come from above in which a government pities individuals and allows them to do things. This individual-rights based legitimacy and power, relies on each and every one being vigilant. If you give up a right to privacy, not only are your own individual privacy weakened, you also weakened the protection for fellow citizens.
• It’s also the argument for your future generations – when you give up these rights now, it will be more difficult for your children to defend themselves against such violations when they finally grow up. We are probably the last pre-internet generation with our childhood photos in analog kodaks. For the next generation whose parents are mostly using convenient web storage for digital photos, their entire childhood is already on the internet, there is no hiding from powerful image processing algos that would track their bio-features (static and dynamic) for LIFE.
• Norm shifting is contagious on both ends of the exchange – the weakening of individuals’ protective norms is communicable, so are the strengthening of surveillance. If we give up a right to privacy, we don’t just empower the immediate counterparty that we signed our rights to, this action empowers other parties. For example, when people are collectively signing off rights to internet service providers which are private companies, they made those private companies positions stronger and the individual protections weaker, and also made the position of government surveillance (which is not a party to the private contract) stronger.
• Snowden raised a strong point against the “I don’t have anything to hide” argument (or the argument “I’m not important enough to be targeted”). There are so many laws not enforced but still left active on the books, you don’t even know if someone broke these obscure laws. But if a surveillance state records everything you said, searched, looked at, and wrote… it could totally use that information (and some obscure law) in the future to use against you, threat you to coerce a behavior. The power imbalance between the individual and the state is forever tilted towards the state.
• He also reflected the role of commercial consumption in the surveillance exchange – when he stumbled upon a $9k Wi-Fi-enabled smart fridge that could talk to consumers, connected to the internet, manageable from a smart phone… oh and accidentally it’s also a fridge. It’s clear to Snowden that the reason for manufactures to make such an appliance, is to take advantage of the information available, what did the consumers buy/eat or not buy/not eat, and to sell the information for profit. It’s ironic that consumers have to PAY for such privilege of voluntary surveillance, which are disguised as technological conveniences benefiting the consumers.
• This is also how ironic for most other smart devices – consumers are paying for the privileges of being tracked. The latest version would boast longer battery, better connectivity, automated functions… which makes tracking easier. In contrast, older computers seem lagging and bulky, but they could be safer from surveillance.
Snowden’s personal experience leading to his 2013 reveal:
• Snowden enlisted in the army right after 9/11, felt that he had to serve the country like so many people did in his family for generations. Yet he gradually realized the loyalty was designed to the system, not to the country or the constitution. After getting in the army, Snowden observed that people get numbed by the repetitive drilling and stopped thinking. The system is designed so people always have buddies accompanying each other, because alone time would lead to thinking, and thinking would be dangerous… Reads like a disillusionment: youth poured hearts into a movement or a cause, gradually realized they’ve given up so much for the wrong thing.
• Homo contractus … Snowden went to work as private contractor, and saw this contracting process as the government gave up trying to manage its intelligence technologies, and leaving it to outside private companies. Snowden described the contradiction that he can’t get to the closest technological secret as a government employee, but he could as a private contractor.
He also saw this as a conflict of interest, where the private contractors earned cost+ as commissioned head hunters, so always had an incentive to increase the pay of individual sub-contractors. The government employees, by dealing with private contracting companies, built a marketable connection/resume convenient for moving to the private companies after retirement.
• He had a sense of purpose, after a disease strike. Epilepsy Seizure ran in his family, and started haunting him. He had to take a medical leave, and while vegetate on the couch watched the human sacrifice in the Arab spring. He learned about the self-immolated produce vendor, and reflected the martyr’s act – taking the last bit of free will, to make an impact on what’s at stake. It seems the Arab spring news jolted Snowden out of the consumerism complacency in growing material possessions (buying a home, furniture and appliances, visiting myriad retail malls).
• Having worked professionally for decade+, he has a realistic sense to separate the aspirational marketing goal of a technical sales pitch (is the function described in the classified document just a pipe dream?) from an actual engineered product. He engineered a big plan to change jobs, from relatively more prestigious positions in system engineering, to lower-rung positions actually working on the front line of surveillance. He had to see for himself that there is an actual surveillance system not just a sketch on the paper … which unfortunately is true. He was shocked to find himself executing a job surveilling an Indonesia man who became a person of interest because he sent a job application to a foreign country that’s on the wrong side of U.S. diplomacy. As that job required, Snowden stealthily turned on this man’s computer’s microphone and camera, listened his conversations and read his screen. He saw this man at home trying to read something, with a toddler in his lap trying to playing with this dad so the man would not focus. That kind of everyday interaction reminded Snowden of his own childhood, and it is this very basic type of human interaction violated through the ambitious state’s worldwide surveillance, that turned him into the path of actions leading to his revelation. (His surveillance experience somehow reminds me of ‘The Lives of Others’.)
Snowden also elaborated on worldwide surveillance: it doesn’t matter where you are, if you use the major internet infrastructure, all components would be from U.S. companies, all of which would comply with U.S. government requests.
Side notes, Snowden’s other interesting ideas:
• If we blindly rely on a tool, without understanding how to fix it, then we are just as good as the tool that we use. If the tool breaks, then we cannot be productive. We cannot only stay on the taker side of technology.
• Snowden’s father and mother both worked for the government, but he does not know the details of his father’s work. He said it’s typical of the technical oriented people – even if they’re not explicitly prohibited from discussing their job details with others, these people are so pigeon holed into small niches, that it is difficult to speak with each other on what you are doing, and unable to connect the dots on what the larger organization is trying to do.
• Of early days of internet as a level playing field, where people treat each other as equals, with no monetization motivations. The BBS system, where it was so easy to assume an alternative (alter), and if he was not happy with the uninformed crowd, and ashamed of how little he knew yesterday, Snowden could quickly disassociate with that previous identity, and laugh at himself for what his last alter did yesterday. He contrasted this with the current day practice, where internet firms are trying hard to identify each individual (and monetize by chasing after people with personalized recommendations based on cookies/internet history). He saw a consequence of people using real identity – they would be digging in after learning that they might have made a mistake, becoming entrenched instead of quickly shedding the immature self.
• On identity – the more you learned about others, the less you know yourself. Snowden confessed that by late teens, he had for a long time had difficulty of writing an autobiographic essay because he spent the most time trying to find about others, and did not reflect on himself.
• Observation on people using the internet differently – back in his teenage days, he’d post a computer hardware related question on the internet, and get a purpose-built composed answer from a computer science professor across the country. People are knowledgeable, and respectful – because in the early days using the internet requires a lot of effort just to logging in – you would not be on the internet unless you are serious into it. It is a selection mechanism to get the most committed ones. By now the internet has become commoditized, everyone with their casual interest in sharing photos use the internet, and selling people as the product has become the best method for internet companies to monetize … this casual user population is totally different from the committed hardcore geeks of earlier years, and an average internet user’s behavior norm treating each other changed.
• After that first document discovery, he worked systematically to get important documents to the public. He looked for journalists to expose this dark story to the world, and astoundingly realized that most journalists (public) do not know enough about technology to react to information already out in the open. For example, a top CIA director said in a civilian industry conference openly that they are developing such capability that everyone, ‘have been, and will be monitored’, and no journalists batted a lash or write about this at all – if a magazine mentioned this conference speech at all, it just followed a standard PR script. So, Snowden had to explain in details to the journalists what were at stake, and how was this possible. All this after he had to teach the journalists how to use encrypted communication of course.
• Snowden used the ‘hack’ verb– he ‘hacked bedtime’ at age 6 by turning all clocks at home back a few hours, ‘hacked’ into Los Alamos lab’s file systems and alerted the system admin there that it’s not safe. It’s telling that he said ‘NSA hacked the constitution’, by refusing to cooperate with congressional investigations into surveillance, even lying to top intelligence committee in congress about the existence of such programs.
• The final execution of the plan after Snowden departed Hawaii to get this information to the public… That story was quietly moving with so many different human characters, poor people who are themselves refugees living in Hong Kong’s slums, human rights lawyer Sarah from Wikileaks who volunteered to accompany him until the last hour – serving as witness so people have to care a little more about how he was treated ….
Last, I saw my own prejudice in Snowden’s book – I consider anime just diversions (and often objectifying females in doing so), hardly things to base world views on. Snowden admitted to form his world views from anime such as ‘Ghost in the Shell’, and games such as Mario brothers. This admission reminds me of geeky friends who are into anime, and invites me to rethink my view.