Recent reports that NSA whistleblower Snowden made political donations to libertarian Ron Paul may not suggest anything useful about Snowden himself, but do recall the very reason why we're here. Here as in being mass monitored by the government of the United States.
Back in the 18th century, the tipping point for Anglo-American settlers who were growing fed up (no pun intended) with the tyranny of King George III and the British empire was a series of taxes on commercial imports. The 1773 Tea Act, which levied taxes on all tea imported to the American colonies, was the iconic example of the 'taxation without representation' complaint that was central to the American Revolution against colonial Britain. What people rarely recall about the 1773 Boston Tea Party is that the ship of taxable tea that never made it back to Britain was an East India Company ship. The East India Company, a British company, was granted a monopoly by the British government on the tea trade with the American colonies. On the other side, this favored British company made it impossible for American merchants to make a living legally in the tea market.
Crucially, what angered 18th-century American revolutionaries wasn't only taxation without representation, but collusion between the government and a favored private enterprise that shut American merchants out of the market.
I bring up this history to point out that, though the rights of an increasingly separate and self-reliant nation of Anglo-American settlers were probably foremost among reasons for US independence, what was also screwing over Americans--what Americans fought and died to undo--was harmful and illiberal collusion between the British state and a series of connected, insider private merchants and investors. While we might argue that the grievances of Anglo-Americans against their government were the biggest deal in the 1770s, we'd have a harder time making that argument in the 21st century.
Back to Snowden and Ron Paul: both, it seems, are emblematic of an ideology of freedom that's now over 200 years old and growing more stale by the minute. In fact, this Citizen VERSUS Government model of freedom never was as pure as we like to think, even in the heyday of overthrowing government tyranny in the 18th century.
The undeniable fact is that you choose every day to share personal data with a series of private corporations like Google and Facebook (I'm doing it right now); and these corporations outright tell you, if you get to the privacy settings, not just that they do collect and use your 'private' data, but that they sell it for billions of dollars in advertising revenue. You sell your privacy on a massive scale in return for free e-mail and social networking. And you don't even do this judiciously (most if you). You 'check-in' whenever you to go a store or a bar or a restaurant; you take pictures of your kids and your friends and post them online for everyone to see (and, if they want, download); many of you post photos of yourselves almost every day of your life.
And then this bomb drops: the government via the NSA has been collecting all of your data. All of that same data that you've been not reluctantly nor even moderately, but EAGERLY giving away to Facebook, Pinterest, Google, etc.; and you're, what, mortified?
This leaves me with what should be the painfully obvious question: why would you trust Facebook or Google more than your representative government?
I'm not saying you should trust either, really; but what kind of cognitive dissonance is going on here that enables people to think that one small group of secretive, extremely powerful people is any less likely than another small group of secretive, extremely powerful people to do wrong by you with all that data?
Further, as history (and, I'm sure, news that will be unveiled in the days ahead) shows, the government and the private sector collude in such a way that it's often quite difficult to definitively say where one begins and the other ends.
Consider that Snowden himself wasn't on the government's payroll while he had access to all the information he leaked; he was an employee of a private contractor. Check the growth of the Washington, DC area since 9/11 and you'll understand just how tight is this collusion, particularly when done in the name of 'security.'
This isn't (or shouldn't be) news, really; but what I want people to understand is this: we've sold out both our privacy and our liberty for two things: the allure and promise of 'big data' and the allure and promise of 'security.' So that we can be so lazy and unthinking that we don't even have to seek out our own next book to read or movie to watch--we just get 'recommendations' based on our shared data--we've abandoned our privacy. So we can have free e-mail, we sell information that makes a handful of companies billions, and provides the government with one-stop shopping sources for our private data. So we can win the 'war on terror' and ensure the 'American way of life,' we've sold the American way of life to Facebook and Google (and, OK, the NSA).
This is emerging, I think, as the great crisis of the West, a crisis which terrorists struck the core of, I think, for now, victoriously, on 9/11: we can talk a big game about the sanctity of freedom, but we have absolutely no idea what to do with it.
