In der Nacht vom 22. auf den 23. Februar 2015 werden in den USA die Oscars vergeben. Gewinnerin in der Kategorie Dokumentarfilm wird Laura Poitras mit „Citizenfour“, einer faszinierenden Doku, die die Enthüllungen von Edward Snowden zum NSA Überwachungsskandal begleitete. Der Film ist kostenfrei im Netz erhältlich. Wer das Geld dafür hat, sollte jedoch dafür sorgen, dass es auch bei den Macher*innen ankommt oder zumindest an eine NGO spenden, die sich für deren Ziele einsetzt.
Am 23. Februar gab es einen AMA (ask me anything) auf reddit von Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald und Edward Snowden. Dieses AMA ist sehr lesenswert, am spannendsten fand ich die folgende Frage von masondog13,:
What’s the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?
Ich finde diese Frage deshalb wichtig, weil sie auch auf uns übertragbar ist. Es ist eigentlich die generische Frage, wie man das Thema generell wieder auf die höchste politische Tagesordnung heben kann. Es gibt darauf mehrere Antworten und eine intensive Debatte. Hier ist die Antwort von Glenn Greenwald, sie bezieht sich noch sehr stark auf US Politik, aber auch auf Deutschland läßt sie sich anwenden, denn auch bei uns sind vor allem die Führungsspitzen beiden Großparteien untätig und wäre es an der Zeit, ihnen massiv das Vertrauen zu entziehen:
The key tactic DC uses to make uncomfortable issues disappear is bipartisan consensus. When the leadership of both parties join together – as they so often do, despite the myths to the contrary – those issues disappear from mainstream public debate.
The most interesting political fact about the NSA controversy, to me, was how the divisions didn’t break down at all on partisan lines. Huge amount of the support for our reporting came from the left, but a huge amount came from the right. When the first bill to ban the NSA domestic metadata program was introduced, it was tellingly sponsored by one of the most conservative Tea Party members (Justin Amash) and one of the most liberal (John Conyers).
The problem is that the leadership of both parties, as usual, are in full agreement: they love NSA mass surveillance. So that has blocked it from receiving more debate. That NSA program was ultimately saved by the unholy trinity of Obama, Nancy Pelosi and John Bohener, who worked together to defeat the Amash/Conyers bill.
The division over this issue (like so many other big ones, such as crony capitalism that owns the country) is much more „insider v. outsider“ than „Dem v. GOP“. But until there are leaders of one of the two parties willing to dissent on this issue, it will be hard to make it a big political issue.
That’s why the Dem efforts to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination without contest are so depressing. She’s the ultimate guardian of bipartisan status quo corruption, and no debate will happen if she’s the nominee against some standard Romney/Bush-type GOP candidate. Some genuine dissenting force is crucial.
„Edward Snowden-2“ von Laura Poitras / Praxis Films. Lizenziert unter CC BY 3.0 über Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Snowden-2.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Edward_Snowden-2.jpg
Viel interessanter finde ich die Antwort von Edward Snowden, denn sie greift den immer wieder entstehenden Grundwiderspruch zwischen gesetzlichem Unrecht und ungesetzlichem Recht auf. Diese Beschreibung einer inneren Pflicht, dem eigenen moralischen Kompass zu folgen, auch wenn dies Verstöße gegen aktuell geltendes Recht bedeutet, ist auf jedes Land und jede Zeit übertragbar. Seine Beispiele aus der Geschichte reichen von Extremen wie dem Naziregime und der Sklaverei bis zu weniger plakativen Rechtsbrüchen, etwa gegen das Mariahuana-Verbot – in all diesen Fällen zeigen Geschichte oder Gegenwart, wie sich Recht verändern kann, auch und gerade durch zivilen Widerstand.
Sein Appell, dass eine staatliche Allmacht solchen zivilen Widerstand künftig im Keim ersticken und damit die eigene Veränderungsfähigkeit des Staates im Kern gefährden kann (und wird), richtet sich an uns alle. Er beschreibt eindringlich, warum unter bestimmten Rahmenbedingungen ziviler Ungehorsam zur Pflicht wird. Nachfolgend die Antwort von Edward Snowden im Wortlaut:
This is a good question, and there are some good traditional answers here. Organizing is important. Activism is important.
At the same time, we should remember that governments don’t often reform themselves. One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, „Data and Goliath“), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.
But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?
Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had — entirely within the law — rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?
Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.
How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens‘ discontent.
How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where — if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen — we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new — and permanent — basis.
Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it’s entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.
We haven’t had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we’ll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they „can“ do rather than what they „should“ do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.
In such times, we’d do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn’t defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.
„How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?“ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that „an unjust law is no law at all.“
Edward Snowden antwortet auch auf eine Frage nach der Glaubwürdigkeit Rußlands hinsichtlich geheimdienstlicher Kommunikationsüberwachung mit einer allgemeingültigen Antwort. Lest selbst:
To tag on to the Putin question: There’s not, and that’s part of the problem world-wide. We can’t just reform the laws in one country, wipe our hands, and call it a day. We have to ensure that our rights aren’t just being protected by letters on a sheet of paper somewhere, or those protections will evaporate the minute our communications get routed across a border. The only way to ensure the human rights of citizens around the world are being respected in the digital realm is to enforce them through systems and standards rather than policies and procedures.
Da hat er einen Punkt. Das heißt nicht, dass wir nicht für Policies und Procedures und natürlich ihre Einhaltung kämpfen sollten, aber ein Schutz, der technisch garantiert wird, ist vermutlich verläßlicher und auf jeden Fall nicht nur innerhalb bestimmter Landesgrenzen gewährt. Nationales Recht bietet keinen ausreichenden Schutz mehr in einer grenzüberschreitenden, digitalen Gesellschaft.
Allerdings hat Ed Snowden manchmal auch mehr Fragen als Antworten. Etwa wenn es darum geht, warum von staatlicher Seite so wenig gegen die ausufernde Überwachung passiert. Snowdens Kernaussage: Wenn wir mächtige politische Entscheider nicht für ihren Machtmißbrauch verantwortlich machen (können), enden wir in einer Gesellschaft, wo solches Verhalten NACH den Wahlen belohnt wird:
One of the biggest problems in governance today is the difficulty faced by citizens looking to hold officials to account when they cross the line. We can develop new tools and traditions to protect our rights, and we can do our best to elect new and better representatives, but if we cannot enforce consequences on powerful officials for abusive behavior, we end up in a system where the incentives reward bad behavior post-election.
That’s how we end up with candidates who say one thing but, once in power, do something radically different. How do you fix that? Good question.
Mr Snowden, do you feel that your worst fear is being realized, that most people don’t care about their privacy?
Diese Frage stellen wir uns ja alle, auch in Deutschland und oft können wir in Medien lesen: ja, die Überwachung interessiert kein Schwein mehr. Edward Snowden sieht das anders, es ist den Menschen nicht egal, aber sie tun momentan nichts, weil sie sich ohnmächtig fühlen. Aber er sieht Licht am Horizont und eine fundamentale Veränderung kommen. Folgerichtig ist auch seine Bewertung der Gesamtlage eine andere. Sie ist erstaunlich optimistisch und unterscheidet sich daher nennenswert von den vielen pessimistischen Untergangszenarien, die für unsere Freiheit bereits allenhalben beschrieben werden. Sie ist ein gutes Ende für diesen Blogpost, denn auch ich glaube an die Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit, Freiheit und Privatsphäre auch in einer digitalen Gesellschaft erfolgreich zu verteidigen bzw. zurückzuerobern. Hier seine Antwort im Wortlaut:
To answer the question, I don’t. Poll after poll is confirming that, contrary to what we tend to think, people not only care, they care a lot. The problem is we feel disempowered. We feel like we can’t do anything about it, so we may as well not try.
It’s going to be a long process, but that’s starting to change. The technical community (and a special shoutout to every underpaid and overworked student out there working on this — you are the noble Atlas lifting up the globe in our wildly inequitable current system) is in a lot of way left holding the bag on this one by virtue of the nature of the problems, but that’s not all bad. 2013, for a lot of engineers and researchers, was a kind of atomic moment for computer science. Much like physics post-Manhattan project, an entire field of research that was broadly apolitical realized that work intended to improve the human condition could also be subverted to degrade it.
Politicians and the powerful have indeed got a hell of a head start on us, but equality of awareness is a powerful equalizer. In almost every jurisdiction you see officials scrambling to grab for new surveillance powers now not because they think they’re necessary — even government reports say mass surveillance doesn’t work — but because they think it’s their last chance.
Maybe I’m an idealist, but I think they’re right. In twenty years‘ time, the paradigm of digital communications will have changed entirely, and so too with the norms of mass surveillance.