Out of Invisible Space

I was under the impression that Barack Obama, our fellow Democrat, had beaten Julian Assange, but apparently that’s not the case. In the end, WikiLeaks only served to declassify documents concealed in nooks and niches that were relevant to military and diplomatic policy, meaning they remain at the level of the chancellor and his offices. This is also good, as it harmonizes perfectly with the calls for transparency and dissolution of barriers to communication that has become tradition.

However, what Edward Snowden stated about the famous U.S. democracy — champion of all democracies — is much more problematic for the image of universal democracy’s No. 1 player. According to this man, the Obama administration makes full use of Internet and telecom surveillance programs. As shown in documents exposed by WikiLeaks, the impact of these programs is far greater than the explanation given for their political purpose. We are in the midst of a black utopia that has, unfortunately, already become reality. The dark side of globalization is beginning to crawl in. You want access to communications? You automatically become part of the mechanisms creating files on you, no matter if you’re a public threat or a simple housewife eager to know about how other countries are doing.

This news has not come alone. Facebook announced that due to a technical error, it has been allowing a leak of confidential information about its users since 2002, making data on 1.1 billion people accessible to third parties. This proves not only the vulnerability of new technologies, no matter how useful, fun and at the same time advanced, but also the infinitesimal differences between technical error and exposure and manipulation by political means. Even if Facebook never intended for this mistake to occur, as its representatives have claimed, the same people state that in the second half of last year the company received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for information about its users from U.S. authorities. During this same time, they targeted between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. Facebook didn’t see it necessary or useful to specify how many of these requests got their expected answer. However, I don’t believe that the network rejected half or more than half of them, but rather that they rejected those regarding suspicions of minor crimes. I would definitely not find it hard to believe that three-quarters of the authorities’ demands were fulfilled. Even if it was only half, at least 9,000 or 10,000 data leaks must have occurred.

I do not believe, despite Germany’s questioning of the Obama administration and of the president himself, that the United States is the only nation with the earnest preoccupations of a unipolar hegemony. Its allies, the British subjects of Her Majesty, share this need to sneak into people’s homes. Another piece of news is that intelligence agencies from across the English Channel are collecting huge amounts of data from emails, Facebook accounts, Internet search engines and, of course, telephone calls. The target is the entire world, putting it under British radar. Afterward, they are the ones sending the harvest to their pals in the U.S.

What this means, on the one hand, is that the time when public and private life were separate is gone and that intrusive actions — perfectly legal in some cases and pending legislative rectifications to make them legal in others — along with the justification of “leaks” through arguments of negligence and technical issues have reached higher and higher levels and are becoming more refined. On the other hand, I think we can start talking about a new type of imperialism and colonialism, more subtle and more insidious, based on the permanent surveillance of the world — from the most insignificant individual to the greatest institutional, state or supranational entities — in the name of a collective need for security that isn’t always invoked at its real level, but rather overrated and used to justify an abusive use of surveillance methods. The concept of network power, alongside the concept of personal freedom, will soon have to be amended and corrected in the face of this evolution. The oasis of human rights that is being continuously narrowed by the hegemonic control of information perpetrated particularly by the West may mold those freedoms into a restrictive pro-Western hegemony, reduced to a standard interpretation by the centers of power.

Romania is a pro-Western state by choice, from the time of the ’48ers [during the Romanian Revolution of 1848]. However, the state cannot make itself compatible with all U.S. and British developments, or for that matter, assimilate them. Even when it comes to European models, the various possible options of the past two centuries were argued differently and were affected through erratic and competitive forces — in France, in Germany — and can only be explained and reconciled as a history not without its own asperities. These new revelations about the collecting of information by the United States should not remain without consequences, even if our country is one of its strategic partners and a full member of NATO.