Snowden and Writers Reflect on Liberty

The Guardian has put together a collection short
essays on liberty written by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and
some writers.

Snowden’s contribution below:

Today, an ordinary person can’t pick up the phone, email a
friend or order a book without comprehensive records of their
activities being created, archived, and analysed by people with the
authority to put you in jail or worse. I know: I sat at that desk.
I typed in the names.

When we know we’re being watched, we impose restraints on our
behaviour – even clearly innocent activities – just as surely as if
we were ordered to do so. The mass surveillance systems of today,
systems that pre-emptively automate the indiscriminate seizure of
private records, constitute a sort of surveillance time-machine – a
machine that simply cannot operate without violating our liberty on
the broadest scale. And it permits governments to go back and
scrutinise every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve
ever spoken to, and derive suspicion from an innocent life. Even a
well-intentioned mistake can turn a life upside down.

To preserve our free societies, we have to defend not just
against distant enemies, but against dangerous policies at home. If
we allow scarce resources to be squandered on surveillance
programmes that violate the very rights they purport to defend, we
haven’t protected our liberty at all: we have paid to lose it.

Ian McEwan, the author of the
novels Atonement
and
Enduring Love, writes that the freedom of expression
supports all other freedoms:

The idea of liberty grandly shelters many sorts of freedom, all
of which, until the onset of modernity, had little definition in
human aspirations. We reach easily now for concepts that once had
no existence: the freedoms of universal franchise, of travel within
and between countries, of assembly, association, worship, privacy,
sexual equality and preference, of due process, of freedom from
torture – the list goes on and is enriched by the proliferating
concept of rights – of prisoners, patients, children, animals, of
rights to clean water, food, a family life. Everywhere in the
world, some or all of these remain contested.

But one freedom underpins the entire list. Without it, the
aspirations clustered under liberty’s umbrella could not have come
into being. Every freedom we possess or are struggling to possess
has had to be thought and talked and written into existence, which
is why the rock on which liberty stands is freedom of expression.
Democracy without it is a sham.

Playwright Tom Stoppard says that liberty taken
to its extreme is anarchy:

Every act of regulation by authority is an erosion of liberty.
That tells us what liberty is, and that you can have too much of a
good thing. Liberty pushed to extreme is anarchy. Regulation pushed
to extreme is dictatorship. Millions of words have been devoted to
finding the balance, and the question remains open. The collective
drift towards more regulation in the western liberal democratic
model is driven by good intentions and by a mad dream of perfect
fairness in which individual discretion and individual
responsibility are intrinsically subversive.

Read the rest of the contributions
here.