Wednesday in London, as part of the annual Open Up? conference hosted by the Omidyar Network, I had the opportunity to interview Alan Rusbridger, the longtime editor of The Guardian newspaper, about the impact of Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive government surveillance programs in the United States and United Kingdom. To my surprise, he was much more optimistic about the impact of the stories published in his paper and elsewhere, like the Washington Post and New York Times, than I expected. And he laid out an extraordinarily ambitious agenda of unfinished work that Snowden has prompted.
Even though the sense of urgency and outrage over the NSA and GCHQ’s dragnet surveillance may have subsided, he argued that “under the surface…an awful lot has changed.” Among those changes: the very rise of open debate in the United States and Europe about these programs, the Obama administration’s decision to shift how it stores phone meta-data, the upgrading of network security and encrypted services coming from major tech companies like Apple and Google, and the shifting mindset of both journalists and lawyers, who now understand that their communications aren’t secure.
The one shortcoming, Rusbridger said, what that “politics isn’t equipped to deal with the enormous number of issues that Snowden has raised.” He added, “There’s a problem of digital literacy in the people we charge to make these balances on our behalf. I look at the average Congressman or MP and I wonder how much they are equipped to have this discussion.
He then unfurled a slide that encapsulated his notes on “what Snowden has given us.” It’s quite a list. During the interview, it was literally unreadable from the stage, but here’s my best effort to transcribe Rusbridger’s catalogue of concerns:
DIGITAL ECONOMY
backlash
businesses built on our data
trust
$ at risk for US/UK
CONSENT
citizens’ consent
did Parliament/Congress know? agree?
is consent meaningful? possible?
OVERSIGHT
ISC and Congress
judges
resources, technical knowledge
privacy advocates, PCLOB
“capture” mindset?
told the truth
meaningful?
SECURITY
haystack vs needle
war on terror
paedophiles, organized crime
drugs
Al Qaeda, ISIL
SECRET
keep everything secret
don’t alert the bad guys
world goes “dark”
won’t talk to press in UK
LEGALITY
is it?
do they break their own rules?
DATABASES
Manning, Snowden
giant databases post 9/11
impossible to keep secure
SILICON VALLEY
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc
security?
voluntary/compulsory cooperation
users’ rights
transparency
TELECOMS
Verizon, Vodafone, etc
compulsory or voluntary
lawful or beyond?
consumers’ rights
WEB
security/backdoors
foreign-domestic?
cryptology/protocols
Balkanization
“dark net” – Tor
HARM
our job 3000 times harder
bad guys change opsec
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Merkel’s phone
G-20 allies
??
UN
PROPORTIONALITY + EFFECTIVENESS
does it work?
is it proportionate
how would we know
LAWS – AGENCIES
RIPA
FISA courts
DRIP
warrants?
“foreign” comms
4th Amendment
1st Amendment
Patriot Act
‘Snoopers Charter’
analogue laws
CIVIL LIBERTIES
in a time of terror
represented in politics
‘NATIONAL SECURITY’
Philby
Blake
Spycatcher
Wikileaks
PATRIOTISM
“Do you love your country”
treason?
LAWS – PRESS
Espionage Act
Official Secrets Act
Terror Act
David Miranda
Australian law
destroyed computers
JOURNALIST
Who’s a journalist?
bloggers vs MSM
“activist” v objective
Guardian ‘open’ model
NYT/Risen
Wikileaks
Laura Poitras
Glenn Greenwald
POLITICS
can’t won’t discuss
narrow framework
IT literacy
capture?
CONFIDENTIALITY
journalists’ sources
lawyers’ communications
medical records
social media
anonymity
OPEN SOURCE
verifying
relative?
responsibility to?
whistleblower
criminal
Pentagon Papers
PRESS
prior restraint
censorship
national security
prior notification
“responsibility”
logistics
notice system
expertise
security
BBC?
dealings with government (look at/ don’t look? rules?)
institutional strength
PRIVACY
data v metadata
consent
what does meta data know?
digital v physical
tracking movements
??, relationships
INTERNATIONAL REACTION
US (Hoover, Nixon)
Germany (Stais, Nazis)
UK (Enigma)
Europe
Brazil
Australia
That’s a literally stunning mind map of the post-Snowden agenda, and also quite an intriguing view into Rusbridger’s editorial brain. In my opinion, perhaps the only topic not clearly highlighted by his outline is the role of citizens in this debate, as voters, activists and consumers. But I think Rusbridger would agree that the public has a big role to play in sorting out how our world works now that we know what governments can do and have been doing with mass surveillance. During our conversation, I asked him whose job it was to wrestle with all these issues? He joked about perhaps someone funding this work, and then he added, “The only thing that I see that is up to the job of taking on this complexity is the web itself,” meaning, all of us.