In June 2013, the biggest act of mass surveillance in the Internet age was exposed by Edward Snowden, a security analyst; Glenn Greenwald, a legal blogger; and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker. They collaborated to release the National Security Agency (NSA) files in The Guardian. The revelations raised a huge public debate, both about the ethics of the surveillance as well as the ethics of publishing the story. Alan Rusbridger , former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, spoke to Hari Narayan about one of the most important journalistic projects undertaken by the publication. Excerpts:
It’s been a little more than two years since the Snowden revelations. Has there been enough debate since then? The USA Freedom Act has done away with some provisions of the Patriot Act. But have the laws gone far enough?
Well, I think the penny has dropped that this is a very complex thing; that this is not just about decisions made by security chiefs without anybody else having a say. Has there been enough debate? No, not enough, but at least there has been some debate. We’ve moved from a world in which the security services didn’t want any of this discussed to one in which they say, ‘We feel we can discuss it’.
Is the Freedom Act enough? Well, I think it is up to each country to decide what its rules are. America has moved from a position of ‘The state will collect all this information’ to ‘It is not alright for the state to hold all the information. The telecom companies can hold it. We can establish a procedure by which we can ask for information’. That, to me, is an improvement. Whether that answers all the questions that Edward Snowden has raised… I doubt it. And technology is moving so fast that it is quite hard for the laws to keep up.
NSA spied even on ally countries: Brazil, India, Germany. Brazil responded by passing an Internet Bill of Rights. Is the debate likely to expand in the rest of the developing world where Internet penetration is low?
May be the developing world has an advantage because it has time to discuss this. The problem in the West was that all the technology was suddenly there. They felt ‘because we can do that, we will do it’. Now, the wiser heads in the intelligence community are thinking: ‘Was it right that we did it because we could’? So the advantage of, may be, not being so far down the digital journey for the developing world is that you have time to say, ‘Well, before we rush into it, let’s work out a discussion’.
Mr. Greenwald in No Place to Hide says that security officials boasted about how surveillance helps the U.S. to dominate the rest of the world, not just in security but also in financial and economic interests. The U.S., for instance, targeted Petrobras. Will legislation be enough to curb this kind of overreach?
How the Internet is governed is something most people have no idea about. I only have a hazy idea about the protocol by which the security and the encryption of the Internet works. The Americans were a bit embarrassed when all of this [revelations about snooping on other countries] came up because they had designed architecture for the Internet. Then other countries found this out and turned on them.
For legislation to catch up with surveillance, should MPs hire someone from the security agencies to advise them?
My instinct is that a lot of the people on the other side of the world [legislators] are not very technologically clued-up. We need experts from different fields — specialists on encryption, on privacy, on civil liberties — having a voice in that. In the post-Snowden world, we have to work out what that oversight mechanism is going to be.
In the U.K., the David Cameron government is not very enthusiastic about the David Anderson report that advocated judicial warrant before mass collection. Have British legislators been somewhat tolerant?
There is a general point that applies to legislators around the world: they don’t want to be seen as being soft on security. If a bomb goes off, people are going to turn around and say, ‘Well, you are the one who stopped our agency’. No politician wants to be in that situation. So, politicians generally find this a very difficult subject to deal with. I think politicians are hampered by not wanting to be blamed. Countries do think about these things differently. Germany has had a terrible history. The Germans don’t like Google Street View. Everybody else in the world thinks this is quite interesting. In Germany, this is a horrible idea. Google had to behave differently there. But in Britain, we haven’t had to deal with agencies that behave badly. The Americans have. They have had FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and Hoover.
Post-Snowden, are there apprehensions that journalists may be scrutinised more?
It is a problem for all journalists — to wake up to the fact that not only can the state intercept your communications, it does. Recent news said that the police went through communication of journalists to know who their sources were. That’s a very alarming thing. The questions that journalists now have to ask, they didn’t have to ask 20 years ago. These are things we have a responsibility to think about.
In June, The Guardian carried an editorial advocating a pardon for Snowden. You met Snowden recently. What can he expect if he returns to the U.S.?
I don’t think we argued for a pardon. I think our position is that he should be able to go back and explain that what he did was in the public interest. He shouldn’t be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. And I think that’s his position too. I think it actually suits the Americans to have him where he is. They know he is not leaking anything. He is harmless. And it looks really bad for him to be in Russia. And so, they can say, ‘Look at Snowden, who is he to lecture us? He is in Russia. He doesn’t care much about human rights, does he?’
Does he miss his country?
I think he loves his country. He would like to be there. But he is someone who has always led a lot of his life online. So he says, ‘My life is not very different. I talk to my friends as I did before’.
Do you think Latin America may be a better place for him? Those countries did not reject his request for asylum.
That would have been his Number 1 choice. He had an awful lot of rejections, from nearly 20 countries. So, he was running out of options. I don’t think Russia would have been first choice, though I’m sure he is very grateful that they are giving him a form of asylum. Now, it is very difficult to imagine how he would, if the Russians lost patience with him, get to South America. In reality, he is probably stuck there for some time, unless, like the stories that surface from time to time say, there is some deal. There was a story last week.
narayanan.g@thehindu.co.in
