The Global Conversation

Tag: Snowden

  • Is loyalty to one’s country
    the highest calling?

    When you read the entire statement of Edward J. Snowden as he explains what he did and why he did it, suddenly larger questions arise — questions for which most national governments on Earth do not seem to have an adequate answer.

    The biggest question of all: Is there any legitimate personal calling higher than loyalty to one’s country?

    Mr. Snowden, as you may now know, released a lengthy statement to the world’s press at the Moscow Airport on July 12. The entire text of that pronouncement was released on the Internet by WikiLeaks. Reading every word of what the man who has been called a “traitor” by many in the United States had to say is, at the very least, fascinating, as it opens a window onto the mind of a person who released classified information about certain U.S. Government intelligence operations, offering us his rationale, and giving people around the world a chance to think deeply about some issues that the human family is more and more going to have to face as we move deeper and deeper into the 21st Century.

    Chief among them: Can the people of our world tolerate living a completely transparent lifestyle? And, perhaps more pertinent: Will the institutions within our world — governments and corporations and political movements and other powerful organizations — ever allow us to?

    To consider all of this within a context, let us publish here the full and complete statement of the man who is currently the world’s most famous whistle blower. Here it is, as posted by WikiLeaks.
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    Hello. My name is Ed Snowden. A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates.

    It is also a serious violation of the law.

    The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

    I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

    Accordingly, I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.

    That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets.

    Since that time, the government and intelligence services of the United States of America have attempted to make an example of me, a warning to all others who might speak out as I have. I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression. The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists. It demanded Hong Kong return me outside of the framework of its laws, in direct violation of the principle of non-refoulement – the Law of Nations. It has threatened with sanctions countries who would stand up for my human rights and the UN asylum system. It has even taken the unprecedented step of ordering military allies to ground a Latin American president’s plane in search for a political refugee.

    These dangerous escalations represent a threat not just to the dignity of Latin America, but to the basic rights shared by every person, every nation, to live free from persecution, and to seek and enjoy asylum.

    Yet even in the face of this historically disproportionate aggression, countries around the world have offered support and asylum. These nations, including Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless. By refusing to compromise their principles in the face of intimidation, they have earned the respect of the world. It is my intention to travel to each of these countries to extend my personal thanks to their people and leaders.

    I announce today my formal acceptance of all offers of support or asylum I have been extended and all others that may be offered in the future. With, for example, the grant of asylum provided by Venezuela’s President Maduro, my asylee status is now formal, and no state has a basis by which to limit or interfere with my right to enjoy that asylum. As we have seen, however, some governments in Western European and North American states have demonstrated a willingness to act outside the law, and this behavior persists today. This unlawful threat makes it impossible for me to travel to Latin America and enjoy the asylum granted there in accordance with our shared rights.

    This willingness by powerful states to act extra-legally represents a threat to all of us, and must not be allowed to succeed. Accordingly, I ask for your assistance in requesting guarantees of safe passage from the relevant nations in securing my travel to Latin America, as well as requesting asylum in Russia until such time as these states accede to law and my legal travel is permitted. I will be submitting my request to Russia today, and hope it will be accepted favorably.

    If you have any questions, I will answer what I can.

    Thank you.

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    I am particularly intrigued by the Nuremberg statement quoted here. As well, the reminder by Mr. Snowden of what he terms “the most basic notion of justice — that it must be seen to be done.” And I know what Conversations with God has to say about this kind of thing. It says that total, complete, and utter transparency in all things is the only way that an advanced society would choose to live — and that a society cannot advance until it does so.

    Your thoughts, please. What about you? Are you ready to live a life of absolute visibility, where everything about you can be known, where you will and can have no secrets, and where privacy around personal information is no longer part of common experience? If not, why not? If so, how so?

    Let’s have a conversation here.

  • WHISTLEBLOWERS MOVE ‘TRANSPARENCY’
    TO TOP OF PUBLIC AGENDA

    The world will one day move to a model of Total Transparency. All highly evolved societies do. We are told this in Conversations with God. The question is how, and when?

    There are those who say that transparency will never work unless and until all elements, all segments, of society are operating on the same model. I agree that this would be the most effective implementation of the idea. Yet it is clear to me that waiting for all cultures, organizations, institutions, governments, corporations, and individuals on our planet to embrace this notion simultaneously would be a waste of time. Such a shift in global consciousness is never going to happen all at once, with the snap of a finger. How, then, will it be produced? By people, organizations, and governments demonstrating leadership through showing the way.

    This will take great courage. Masses of people do not like individual people who show the way to a new lifestyle. We like followers, not leaders.

    We accuse leaders of making us “wrong,” of putting down our current way of being, of tearing apart our society with their “new ideas” and their “new rules,” and with their exposing of our foibles and of the non-beneficial outcomes of our present behaviors.

    My favorite (and saddest) story about this is the account of Ignaz Semmelweis, described in Wikipedia as a Hungarian physician of German extraction and now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures.

    According to the Wikipedia article, Dr. Semmelweis “discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal, with mortality at 10%–35%. Semmelweis postulated the theory of washing with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors’ wards had three times the mortality of midwives’ wards. He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.

    “Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings.

    “Semmelweis’s practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French micropbiologissst’s research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum,  where he died at age 47 after being beaten by the guards as he tried to escape, only 14 days after he was committed.”

    Four of the latest people to show us our foibles and the non-beneficial outcomes of our behaviors have been Julian Assange, the Australian Internet activist who is created with having created WikiLeaks; Bradley Manning, a United States Army soldier arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed diplomatic cables and other classified material to WikiLeaks — much of which is said by some to have generated many of the uprisings of what has come to be called the Arab Spring; William Binney, described by Wikipedia as “a former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency turned whistleblower,” who has repeatedly claimed that the NSA regularly engages in warrantless eavesdropping, including surveillance of email, phone records, and other data; and Edward J. Snowden, the latest whistleblower, who recently unveiled information about U.S. Government surveillance of phone records and other data from millions of Americans.

    All are considered by many to be traitors and criminals, who some believe should be punished by death or by life imprisonment for revealing the military, diplomatic, and security secrets of governments (chiefly, the U.S. Government) to the world.

    Whether these men are “traitors” or “heroes” is a matter for history to decide. But they certainly do illustrate the danger of some people practicing transparency while others do not. Lives can be at stake — as those who argue for severe punishment of these men point out. Yet it has also been argued by others that many lives have been saved as a result of their whistleblowing.

    Whatever the outcome of their cases and of their lives, there is no question that they and others have placed high on the public agenda the topic of just how open human society should be and can be. And the invitation in Conversations with God is for all of us, on an individual level, to practice complete and utter transparency in our daily lives, personal and business interactions, and intimate relationships — whether or not others are doing so also.

    In this, as in all things that produce revolutionary and evolutionary shifts in our global society, somebody has to go first.