It was a rare opportunity. NESTA had invited me to join a conversation with Edward Snowden during its FutureFest and I certainly was not going to miss it. We were asked to provide a set of questions, and I wanted to ensure that mine would be neither embarrassing nor trivial. I ended up formulating the following three, about the surveillance society. They are questions that bother me, both as a citizen and as a philosopher. Here they are.
Floridi at Future Fest interview Snowden (via Hangout). Photo: factor-tech.com
- TRUST. The disclosure of many global surveillance programs – especially those run by the NSA and the Five Eyes with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments – has undermined public trust.
In your view, how could we rebuild such trust? For example: do we need new or different laws, or new, controlling third-parties, or different technologies … or… ?
- ACCOUNTABILITY. In a world awash with information, we seem increasingly obsessed with secrecy. In your view, how could the accountability of secret services be strengthened and guaranteed in democratic and liberal societies?
- ETHICAL BALANCE. After the cold war, the new war on terror now seems to encourage democratically elected governments to ask their citizens for increasingly great “ethical sacrifices”: more undisclosed surveillance (e.g. NSA), more profiling (e.g. ethnic), more open controls (e.g. security at the airports), more powers to stop and search, longer times for holding someone in custody without a charge (e.g.
in the UK you can be held without charge for up to 14 days if you are arrested under the Terrorism Act), more aggressive approaches in investigations and interrogations of suspects (e.g. waterboarding torture), less freedom of movement of people, goods, and services (e.g. foreign visas), more reliance on easily accessible technologies (e.g. digital backdoors). Such sacrifices are requested in the name of social welfare and individual security. In your view, what kind of ethical balance, if any, could be reached between security on the one hand and respect for human rights and civil liberties on the other?
Following the flow of the conversation I decided to ask only the first and the last question, and improvise a third one, towards the end of the hour we had at our disposal.
You can hear Snowden’s answers here.
Snowden made some reasonable, balanced, well-informed comments on the need to restore trust, implement serious checks and accountability measures, and ensure that governments do not continuously erode civil rights. I entirely agreed with him on everything he said. But I was left with a desire for more, for some constructive strategy about how we may rebuild that special part of the social contract that concerns citizens’ security.
HOW TO REBUILD CONFIDENCE GOVERNMENT / CITIZENS
Regarding the first question in my list, the difficulty is that, once betrayed, trust is incredibly hard to restore. No matter how well you glue the pieces together, it seems that lost trust is never whole again, like some cracked pottery. A culture of suspiciousness settles in, and no direct communication is taken at face value any more.
No matter what the NSA says now, who is going to believe it? A full apology and some decent cleaning up is not enough. More needs to be done.
But what exactly is this “more”? Life teaches us that there are really two mechanisms that can restore trust. Both are radical. Neither is painless.
One may opt for a new start, the equivalent of a divorce and a second marriage. It is a bit misleading to call it a restoration of trust, because the original trusted partner is actually replaced. So one may object that you are really buying a new vase, so to speak, not repairing the old one. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. For it is also a matter of repairing the trust relationship in itself, because people who have lost trust once are less inclined to trust ever again. With an analogy, a divorced person may not be able to re-marry, if all faith in marriage has been damaged. Someone disappointed by a broken vase may never buy the same vase again. Out of metaphor, the radical logic of this strategy consist in removing the untrustworthy element, now unfixable, while saving the relationship of trust one had implemented initially, and re-direct the later towards a new interlocutor. In practice, this would amount to closing down the NSA and start again from scratch, by establishing a new security agency that one can trust.
Photo: dailytech.com
The other mechanism is that of vulnerability. In this case, the damage caused to trust needs to be counterbalanced by a much higher price paid in terms of commitment to the offended party: if A has lost trust in B because B has betrayed it, in order to regain it B must put itself in a total and open relation of dependency on A’s mercy, making itself so weak and vulnerable that A may decide to trust B again.
If you no longer trust me I need to place you in such a position of power over me that you may change your mind. I need to put a metaphorical loaded gun in your hands.
Restoring trust by offering unconditional vulnerability in return means, in practice, that the NSA should empower an independent, powerful agency to oversee all its actions, and implement measures of total transparency towards it.
Both mechanisms require very difficult choices. Their adoption would guarantee some serious degree of accountability (and this paves the way to an answer to my second question above), and hopefully help to find some balance between security, surveillance, and civil liberties (see my third question). But I am afraid we may not be ready to adopt either option. So my third and last question to Snowden was different from the one I had planned. Essentially I asked him: what would it take for the system of massive surveillance to change, if even your revelations have not yet succeeded? Unfortunately, we know that the past provides a sad answer: a tragic disaster. Wait for it.
