Smart in some regards, not so much in others:
It’s the not knowing that’s the hardest thing, Laura Poitras tells me. “Not knowing whether I’m in a private place or not.” Not knowing if someone’s watching or not. Though she’s under surveillance, she knows that. It makes working as a journalist “hard but not impossible”. It’s on a personal level that it’s harder to process. “I try not to let it get inside my head, but… I still am not sure that my home is private. And if I really want to make sure I’m having a private conversation or something, I’ll go outside.”
Very strange. If I were under surveillance, the last thing I would do is have a conversation outside. I’d find an embassy hostile to my surveillance, and try to meet up inside it.
Poitras’s documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour, has just been released in cinemas. She was, for a time, the only person in the world who was in contact with Snowden, the only one who knew of his existence…
“Jake” – Jacob Appelbaum – is an American who helped develop the anonymous Tor network, and went on to work with WikiLeaks. He’s also in Berlin, having discovered that he was the subject of a secret US grand jury investigation, and it was he who advised Poitras to come here. “I’d been filming him doing this extraordinary work training activists in anti-surveillance techniques in the Middle East and I asked him where I should go, because I just didn’t think I could keep my footage safe in the US. And he said Germany because of its privacy laws. And Berlin because of all the groups doing anti-surveillance work here…”
But then Hubertus Knabe tells me: “The minister of the Stasi always said, ‘We have to answer the question, who is who?’ Those were his words. That means, who thinks what? It used to be an obvious fundamental difference between a democratic state and a dictatorial one that you don’t investigate someone until they did a criminal act. Innocent people are not surveiled. And in this, the difference between how a democratic state acts and how a totalitarian one acts has diminished. And this is very, I don’t know the English word. Besorgniserregend? Hold on, I will look it up,” and he taps into his phone. “Alarming! This is very alarming to me.”
I’m about to leave when he tells me about a conference he held recently at the museum. “And this man, a former prisoner, kept saying this very strange thing. It was very annoying at first. He kept saying, ‘I am your future’. ‘I already experienced what will be your future.’ But he was very serious. He had emigrated to Paris. He really meant it…”
It could happen because it has happened. Anne Roth, a political scientist who’s now a researcher on the German NSA inquiry, tells me perhaps the most chilling story. How she and her husband and their two children – then aged two and four – were caught in a “data mesh”. How an algorithm identified her husband, an academic sociologist who specialises in issues such as gentrification, as a terrorist suspect on the basis of seven words he’d used in various academic papers.
Seven words? “Identification was one. Framework was another. Marxist-Leninist was another, but you know he’s a sociologist… ” It was enough for them to be placed under surveillance for a year. And then, at dawn, one day in 2007, armed police burst into their Berlin home and arrested him on suspicion of carrying out terrorist attacks.
But what was the evidence, I say? And Roth tells me. “It was his metadata. It was who he called. It was the fact that he was a political activist. That he used encryption techniques – this was seen as highly suspicious. That sometimes he would go out and not take his cellphone with him… ”
He was freed three weeks later after an international outcry, but the episode has left its marks. “Even in the bathroom, I’d be wondering: is there a camera in here?”
I’m not so sure about Berlin. I’d prefer to go to some place like Russia, where I’d expect to get spied on. Being spied on by Russians while staying in their country would be preferable to being spied on by my own people in my own country. My guess is at some point the alt-right will have a lot of people molding the dialog in the US from within Russian borders, and I would not expect them to be happy about it, or prone to support the establishment. The internet is really going to change the nature of revolution, and the roles of exiles.
What I would love to know is why when money begins to flow around freely, and government can siphon off a portion, it never goes to a cure for cancer, or a new antibiotic, or some way to provide medical care cheaper. It goes to support for pedophile networks, welfare for billionaire cronies, and ways for the politicians at the top to cement their ability to control the peons beneath them more effectively, and destroy freedom in the process. It speaks to the piss poor leadership we have been electing, and how r-selection advances those who oppose greatness in pursuit of their own ascension.
If Trump plans to tap the nation’s debt aggressively for infrastructure, and then let it all come down, the problem will be self-limiting. If he actually fixes things, I am pretty sure nobody will want to see what that world would look like.
Of course with $20 Trillion just in national debt, and an economy at the verge of collapse, as he prepares to begin the big draw on the debt, I am not overly worried.
r/K Selection Theory could be useful because your surveillance needs something to listen to.
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