As I recently told an ex-coworker of mine who was trying to discretely and awkwardly explain that her boyfriend worked for "the state department", I live in DC and it is weirder if you don't know anyone who works for the government. Personally, I grew up as a child of this region. My distant memories are speckled with the interiors of the on base day care of Fort Meade and even getting to see daddy's desk and solve algebraic word problems like daddy does at work all day at a Family day.
Therefore, I could easily spend the entirety of this post stating the obvious Hollywood imagination such as the fact that if the security when entering a government office actually showed all the details of the body such as it did in the movie, my father would not have died from kidney cancer because it would have been caught on his daily check in, the cubicles are not that pretty, nor is the board room in which Snowden skyped with his spirit guide (if you saw this movie you probably thinking, spirit guide... what spirit guide? Don't you mean the director of the CIA? Well, yes that is what he is referred to. However, the director of the CIA has somewhere in the ballpark of tens of thousands of people working under him, does not conduct interviews for entry level positions, does not teach computer hacking 101 to new recruits, would be very unlikely to develop a personal relationship with a new recruit, and certainly would not being spying on the girl friend of an analyst level employee or contractor. This man is merely the figment of either Snowden or Oliver Stone's imagination and is really used as a spirit guide throughout the film.).
I could also probably dive into the questions of what he actually pulled out which actually, from what I can find, nothing more than what I consider intuitive if you actually think about it a little bit and how if random hackers have the capabilities to trace everything you do, shouldn't your government also have the capabilities as well? Are there possibly shady people working in the government who use this information beyond what they should? Sure there are people doing things they shouldn't do everywhere, but they are also fired if caught using there tools the way the NSA agent showed Snowden while he was working at the CIA. For anyone who thinks that there is "no oversight" on NSA, I urge you to visit the website of the Government Accountability Office (the GAO). Historically, the NSA and the GAO aren't exactly friends, because as people who work for the GAO say "They (We) will not be corrupted." The GAO has the security and the authority to look into anything that NSA is doing and make sure they are adhering to their own standards. Most people don't bother to read these GAO reports for one simple reason. They are really freaking boring with lots of annotations and cited sources. However, they are highly accurate and one of the absolute best sources of information you can find. If something bad is going on in NSA without the public's knowledge, the GAO will find it and they will hold the NSA responsible.
However, what I would prefer to actually turn your attention to is actually beyond all the mess of what one without a security clearance could possibly fully dive into (and even with a security clearance, everyone is on a need to know basis the way that Snowden got so much was by creating a web crawler virus which did steal the information, so how much could we know). I want to look at specifically how Snowden is his own greatest fear. What Snowden wants is privacy in his own world. However, by doing what he did in the way he did, he essentially set off a bomb in a mall in the name of ending violence. He pulled out the privacy of the government and with it potentially the privacy of those working for the government, those privacy of those being watched by the government, and everyone who was picked up as part of information collection. Snowden has essentially lost all privacy personally as he is now on a government watch list and he continuously has cameras pointed at him in order to try to prove to us that we should be worried about the government's ability to watch us.
Snowden is afraid of the fact that we are being watched in the same sense that someone should be afraid of being watched while grocery shopping. If you go to the grocery store, you will notice there are cameras staring at you with their beady little black eyes. You probably really don't care that they are there, unless you are going to steal something. However, whether you have stolen something or not, they are watching and recording so someone can go back and pull the footage in case you do. In the same way, the government is continuously recording information. It would take more people than exist in the United States to watch the population of the United States all the times. They are merely storing the information for when they do need it.
So what is motivating the government to pull this information and watch you? Because they can and they want to feel more powerful than you? Not really, that probably aligns more closely with Snowden's motives than the governments. The reason they pull and watch this information is in order to prevent actual bombs from going off. It would be brilliant to live in a world were we had no fear of a plane crashing purposefully into building, a gun being pulled on us in the street, or even identity theft. Unfortunately, we do not live in a Utopian fairy tale, we live in this reality. In this reality we need people to help watch our back for us, and we call that our government. NSA is absolutely brilliant when it comes to the defense side of the governmental game, but what about the offensive side?
It is often said that the best defense is a great offense. So, what offensive game could the government play to lower the need for groups such as the NSA. The true first step to lowering the rate at which someone has their eye on you, is to actually lower the risk of the world. People don't blow themselves up in the name of god because they have a pretty good life with food in their bellies and warm clothes on their back. In fact, the ancient Romans used to say "an uprising is only three missed meals away." In order to lower the risk of someone attacking, you need to take care of them. We need to look less into pouring money into our defense and look at pouring it into the offensive tactics of our social programs. A second look at that lovely GAO website shows that we actually do have many social programs to help our people, the people of developing nations, and even developing nations themselves. However, a lot of these programs have a lot of trouble getting the funding they need, because we too often are too busy playing defense instead of offense.
Therefore, we as a nation need to come together to make sure the people who represent us in congress know that we want these programs to be a priority. That we want GAO to go in and do reports on whatever might be keeping you up at night at the NSA or any other program you might be nervous about. We need to recognize that we do not live in communist China. After all, we know the terrible things that make up our own history. In China, no one knows what happened in Tiananman Square, because the people who saw it disappeared and everyone is prevented from researching it. If Snowden should be afraid of his government as much as he is, you would not know his name. He would have simply disappeared along with all those working with him. The government is nothing more than a collection of people and in this country we decide who they are. We may have some poor options at times, but at the end of the day, they go into those roles for us and we are the ones who allow them to stay there. If you have a problem with the world, just don't cry about it as Snowden has, instead, come up with a solution, volunteer to develop it, pitch it to your government, and make a real difference for the positive.
