Useless Big Brother

The revelations made by Edward Snowden, ex-CIA operative and consultant for the American National Security Agency, when he published documents uncovering America’s “surveillance state,” give us food for thought. It is no small matter when a state engages in wholesale espionage of its people. It stirs up a number of ideas.

The first is that, in reality, Snowden has uncovered a truth that many already suspected. After the approval of the Patriot Act in the Bush Jr. era, a number of liberties — especially those concerning privacy — were formally limited in the interest of protecting the United States from terrorist threats. The (relative) revelation is that, under Obama’s Democratic government, this intrusion under the pretext of national security was not only not scaled back, it was actually increased. The government sticks its nose into phone conversations, emails, web pages and more. Of course, it also spies on other governments.

It did not take long to reveal that other governments — the first to be identified was the U.K. — use similar procedures. Their appetite for information is such that they spied on all of the participants at the 2009 G-20 summit, with particular emphasis — only the Secret Service knows why — on the Turkish delegation. But not one of the countries in attendance — Mexico included — was spared. We must presume that Peña Nieto, who at the time of writing is in the U.K., already knows that the walls have ears.

The truth suspected all along is that all governments engage in espionage, in accordance with their means and respective levels of paranoia. And now, it seems, it happens more than ever, thanks to the huge quantity of easily-accessible information on the Internet and also — let’s be honest — thanks to our chronic inability to keep our mouths shut and our love of airing our dirty laundry in public.

We know that knowledge is power. The intention of each and every government is to consolidate its power. That is why their natural temptation is to gather as much information as possible, thinking that it will allow them to perform better and, above all, keep them in power. There are some governments that show greater restraint, whether because of tradition, ideology or strict regulation, but not one of them is a stranger to it all together. As such, all of them engage in practices they say they don’t.

The problem and the scandal, in my opinion, revolve around two main issues. One has to do with scale. Snowden’s revelations point to an enormous machine used for spying on normal citizens, which has become an almost self-propagating system. The other issue has to do with governmental credibility. The Obama administration said it was relaxing the aspects of the Patriot Act that were unconstitutional; this was not the case. Obama’s government completely gave in to the temptation to be Big Brother.

As we know, Big Brother is a character from George Orwell’s excellent, dystopian novel “1984,” set in a world dominated by all-seeing, totalitarian regimes, drunk on the power of propaganda, that go so far as to change the language in order to make certain libertarian thoughts impossible. In the novel, each and every citizen of Oceania knows Big Brother is watching them.

If we are a little more incisive, we will see that Big Brother’s spying abilities are more a function of the government’s dictatorial character — that is to say the repressive capacities of the Party and the leaders of the Ministry of Love (of torture and re-education) — than of the technology available to it.

The idea of mass espionage against citizens clashes with the central concept of democracy, namely a government of the people. It also further deepens the divide between the governors and the governed: It creates the “us versus them” mentality typical of authoritarian societies. It is also, of course, in contrast with the ideological cornerstones of the United States and of other Western democracies.

That said, two questions remain, which are the most pointed ones for me: What is all of this espionage for? Does technology really help?

My tentative answers are: 1) To create the idea that they are controlling that which is out of their control, and 2) No.

The problem with the so-called “era of information” is that we now have too much — far, far too much — of it at our fingertips. The amount of information exchanged over cathodic and electromagnetic networks, stored on computer bits and other gadgets, is beyond our imagination. Nonetheless, the pretension of — Big Brother’s — apprentice wizards is to seize it all. Technologically speaking, and with a great human effort, it is possible. The impossible part is editing it correctly.

Let me explain. Governments might seize millions of terabytes of information, but how do they find the needle in the haystack? How can they differentiate between the useful and the useless? Have they come up with the right algorithm for that?

I don’t think so, at least not yet. In order to do that, they have to clearly define what they want to spy on and what they don’t. And we all know that every bureaucrat with a policeman’s soul prefers to compile too much information than too little. The result is a veritable flood of barely refined information which is often useless, or at least very difficult to classify. At the end of the day, this classification will always be a subjective process carried out by a handful of civil servants. And that rarely ends well.

But this overzealous compilation often creates its own gaps. It is like those firewalls that try to keep employees on task — they cannot access pages that use the words “sex” or “puta” [bitch, whore] and as a result they cannot access the “Sexagésima segunda legislatura de la Cámara de Diputados” [The 62nd Term of the Chamber of Representatives], but they can access those dedicated to “she-males.” It is a whole lot of spying in the name of national security, but when it comes down to it, it is more or less useless.

In the case of the United States, let us take the case of the Tsarnaev brothers. They were surely watched and monitored using all of the most advanced methods. Even Moscow had warned the Americans they were planning something ugly. But in the midst of so much information, this got left by the wayside, apparently because of some gringo’s inability to spell such a difficult surname, with the tragic results that we all saw in Boston.

In other words, in a democracy, spying is all but useless. Let’s leave it to the dictators, shall we?