For Person Of The Year: Edward Snowden

Back in October, Eye On Miami offered our vote to Time Magazine for the Person of the Year to NSA leaker, Edward Snowden. The Person of the Year should be someone uniquely suited, through his or her actions, to the times. Popes come and go but rarely does a Shakespearean character emerge fully clothed like Edward Snowden.

Snowden blows the doors off an issue closeted in America's consciousness: how much freedom we surrender to technologies whose reach and scope our Founding Fathers could never have imagined. Where do we draw the line on data collection? How do we dial back the national security state? but for Edward Snowden, these questions would be dormant.

There is enormous pressure now -- and it is reflected in what you hear from esteemed members of Congress -- to keep the wraps on surveillance technologies that touch our liberty and, by extension, vilify anyone with the temerity to expose the extent of data mining, collection, and storage.

From outside appearance, Edward Snowden is unremarkable. His skills sets with computers and software don't intersect with 99 percent of people his age. He would be the geek you might avoid in high school. (His detractors now harp on that story line. How he sat before his computer with a hood covering both his head and the screen.)

What makes us so uncomfortable in our celebrity-driven culture is that Snowden is an anti-celebrity. Everything about him speaks to the ordinary -- where cultural fame demands beauty, he is average looking, where our conscious attractions require of famous performers that any flaw in appearance be accompanied by a special character of voice, delivery or skill, Snowden is pallid, his stubble is average, nothing about him on film or photo sings -- and what he did was extraordinary.

His most ordinary fault is that under almost every other conceivable outcome of his interests and skills he would never be famous.  He is not an inventor. He is not a software or hardware designer. Had Shakespeare any inkling of what was to come, the great Bard or maybe Samuel Beckett might have invented him.

Eugene Robinson, OPED writer for the Washington Post, yesterday wrote that Snowden comes across as "smug and self-righteous-- an imperfect messenger, to say the least." I disagree. Think of the enormity of what Snowden did and try to imagine his actions performed by a grizzled veteran like Daniel Ellsberg or senior scientist. No. It takes someone young, reckless and idealistic to first gain access to the security state and then use keystrokes on a computer keyboard to undo the secrecy that required hundreds of billions of taxpayer investment.

Note from Quartz:

As more and more revelations emerged from the documents Edward Snowden lifted from the US National Security Agency, observers seemed numbed by the sheer scope and audacity of the agency’s domestic and foreign internet surveillance. The fallout for the tech industry has just begun: US companies must now prove, especially to foreign customers, that the move to cloud-based services, which necessitates sending all their data through the very same communication nodes to which the NSA has access, won’t put all of their secrets in the hands of US spymasters by default.

The effects are already being felt. Cisco blamed a poor quarter on deals in Russia and Brazil soured by fears about the NSA. Cisco also warned that this will affect many other US firms, and that it threatens the future of the internet of things—fitting, since the implications of a world in which every gadget is a potential mole sure are scary.

Inevitably, Snodwen's actions will drive the national security state to more inventive barriers and paranoia. With a history of lying to Congress and even to the President, now that the NSA is burying itself even deeper, who will reign in the spying? Edward Snowden might be all American voters and taxpayers ever get in terms of a single individual with the knowledge, access, and ability to publicly disclose the event of surveillance on all Americans and how the quest to find the needle in the haystack has put the tools for massive repression in the hands of a few people we trust to honor our privacy.

When Snowden says, as he does now, that the invasion of personal freedom has gone so much further than Orwell could have imagined, who can doubt he is right?

Robinson concludes:

(Snowden) was an obscure analyst working for a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor at a remote outpost in Hawaii. When he began working in the secret world, by his own telling, he was a true believer. But he became disillusioned — and then incensed — at what he considered outrageous violations of individual privacy by a surveillance apparatus that was out of control.
Snowden’s decision to leak massive amounts of information concerning some of the NSA’s most secret and intrusive spying programs has done more than embarrass officials in Washington. It has galvanized efforts throughout the world to protect what little privacy we have left.
Snowden’s revelations are devastating in their specificity. Americans know that all of our phone calls are logged by the government in a massive database. German Chancellor Angela Merkel knows that the NSA tapped her mobile phone. Brazilians and Indonesians, among others, know that their phone conversations may be listened to and their e-mails may be perused.
We know that secret court orders have forced phone companies and Internet providers to surrender private information. We also know that, unbeknown to those companies, the NSA and its partners — the equivalent spy agencies in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — apparently tap into fiber-optic cables and guzzle as much information as they can.
These ongoing disclosures provide a detailed map of a shadow realm that spans the globe. We now know how technology is destroying privacy — and what steps governments and communications companies must be pressured to take in order that privacy survives.
I can’t think of any individual who had more influence in 2013. Edward Snowden is the person of the year."