Snowden deserves our thanks for revealing world of surveillance

PRESUMABLY, if Edward Snowden ever returns to America, or is captured and brought there, he will meet at least the same fate as Jim Larkin.

That’s not ok, and right now, it seems, a majority of Americans think it’s not ok. Voices all over the world must be raised in defence of Edward Snowden. It’s more of him we need, not less.

Edward Snowden has revealed a great deal about the power wielded in secret by elements of the American state, with the support of the president we have all admired. For that, Snowden has been told he wants to destroy his country, and the world has been promised that he will be hunted down and held to account for his “crimes”.

When Jim Larkin, the great Irish trade union leader, was in America he published a leaflet, and was put on trial for doing so. It was 1920, and the charge he faced was one of criminal anarchy. Along with several other people he had written and published a document called the “Left Wing Manifesto” which was deemed by the prosecutors to be advocating the overthrow of the state.

Larkin’s trial lasted for ten days. He was his own lawyer, and his only witness in the trial. In the end, he sought to rely on the power of his oratory — the oratory that Countess Markievicz once described as “a tornado, a storm-driven wave”. At the end of the trial he addressed the jury, without notes, for 3½ hours. Reporters covering the trial felt sure that the jury would acquit him after an immense performance, but it wasn’t to be, and he was convicted and sentenced to between 5 and 10 years jail in Sing Sing prison.

Some extracts and phrases from that speech have been used many times, to encapsulate the personality and the vision of the man. He described himself, for instance, as being possessed all his life by “a burning desire to close the gap between what ought to be and what is”. But the end of the address was about freedom of speech, and this is how he concluded: “What does all this mean for the freedom of thought and inquiry? Why Einstein and men like him would not be allowed to function, would not be allowed to think. You would have no field of activity either in religion, in art or in science. State functionaries are going to put a steel cap on the minds of the people of this country and they are going to screw it down until they make you all one type.

“… Who used force and violence? Is it the strong that use force? Is it the strong that use violence? It is always the weak, the cowardly, those who can only live by conservatism and force and violence. It has always been down the ages the weak, the bigoted, those who lack knowledge, that have always used force and violence against the advancement of knowledge.

“Gentlemen, some day you in America will be told the truth. In the meantime we who have been on the housetops telling the truth have to suffer. We have to go down the dark days and the dark nights, but we go there with the truth in our eyes and our hearts, and no lie upon our lips.”

I’ve never read a better speech about freedom than that one. Last Saturday I read in the Guardian newspaper that Facebook has already handed over content relating to 20,000 user accounts, and Microsoft supplied information on 31,000 consumer accounts in the second half of 2012 alone. It is beyond question surely that we are in the midst of the greatest assault on individual freedom that has ever taken place. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, even freedom of thought — they now face the greatest threat there has ever been.

We now know, thanks to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, that two top secret operations run by the American National Security Agency, called Operation Prism and Operation Boundless Informant, routinely collect and classify literally billions of pieces of information from all over the world. There is no computer manufacturer, no internet provider, no social media company, whose information cannot be intercepted, analysed, and used.

For revealing all this, Edward Snowden has been branded a traitor. He is anything but. If the world listens to what he has to say, he may have saved us all from a future where power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Right now, the argument is about terrorism. Although it’s becoming harder and harder, and unless it’s proved to the contrary, I’m still prepared to believe that these weapons are in the hands of the good guys, and that some sort of judicial or constitutional restraint is exercised in the way they are used. The defence for collecting data on this scale is that it is necessary to protect our freedom — it is necessary to limit our freedom of expression in order to keep us free from external enemies.

Even if that’s true, it’s only true now. Not for ever. Sooner or later, the external will become internal. There is an inevitable, inexorable equation behind all of this. Information equals power. Total information equals total power. Power corrupts. Total power corrupts totally.

It was Lord Acton to whom that phrase about power corrupting is most often attributed — he said it in a letter, and added in the next sentence “Great men are almost always bad men”. And Acton also said “Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity”. Edward Snowden, and people like him, are the best protection we have in a world of secret power.

IT MAY seem spurious in this context — I assure you it’s not — but there is a link between this threat and another discussion we have been having in Ireland over the past few weeks. The proposal to make history an optional subject for students starting secondary school is fundamentally wrong, and will do immense damage. A basic grounding in history, some sense of the things that go to form us, is an essential ingredient in the development of citizenship.

Active and committed citizenship is the best guarantee that freedom and democracy can’t be done away with, no matter how they’re attacked by other forces. In Jim Larkin’s phrase, history and a commitment to equal citizenship, are among the tools that most often help us to close the “gap between what ought to be and what is”.

It’s never been more important that we commit to our sense of citizenship. At a time when we are slowly discovering how much power is wielded in secret — and how much of that covertly-acquired information is finding its way into the hands of our own authorities, I wonder? — we must constantly assert and demand our right to be respected as citizens.

As Jim Larkin said, not far short of a hundred years ago, state functionaries are in a position to put a steel cap on the minds of the people. When, I wonder, will they start to screw it down?