Obama, Technology and the American Peace that No Longer Is

The pursuit of Snowden shows the deceitfulness of the U.S. president, a man of noble speeches who increases the use of drones or claims to fight climate change as he looks for oil in Alaska.

Science enlightens our understanding, identifying regularities (“laws”) in natural phenomena, but it is technology that changes our lives. The U.S. president, Barack Obama, has clearly understood this better than perhaps any other world leader. He has already shown such understanding during the campaign that led to his presidency, when he used information technology to raise funds as well as to contact voters. Once installed in the presidency, he has continued to show signs of the role that advanced technology plays in his policies.

The case of Edward Snowden, the ex-employee of the U.S. National Security Agency who revealed secret documents showing the massive surveillance that the country has been engaged in for some time, has clearly shown the technological dimension of the federal government’s policy. The issue in this case is how the U.S. uses its immense capacity to handle massive data collected throughout the world through social networks, emails, phone calls and other gadgets of information technology to identify potential security risks. “Throughout the world” and “potential security risks” are expressions on which to reflect. In fact, the U.S. is not only limited to analyzing data from its own citizens, but also from those of other nations — both friendly and not friendly — including, of course, their governments.

As for the purpose of widespread surveillance and avoiding the inevitable partiality of “risks,” the adjective “potential” is dangerous. The idea of controlling lives for personal inclinations abuses the foundation of justice: Thinking bad things is not illegal, but doing them is. It is true that preventing risks is necessary, but not when it largely interferes with essential attributes such as liberty and privacy. The totalitarian states are the ones who put their ideas of safety and risks above freedom and security. A great thing about democratic systems is that they assume risks in order to maintain principles such as the presumption of innocence or the safeguarding of the rights of others (not everyone shares this opinion: Within the pages of El País on July 14, 2013, the impeccable democrat Mario Vargas Llosa showed his astonishment to some of the contrary arguments on the behavior of Obama’s administration).

The capacity to control, derived from current information technology, is overwhelming. As explained in a magnificent book that was recently published, “Big Data” (Turner) by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, “social network platforms do not just offer us a way to locate and maintain contact with friends and colleagues, they also take intangible elements of our daily lives and transform them into data that can be used to do new things,” for example, identifying our likes and ideological inclinations, even our moods. Then there are the web pages that we consult, the phone calls we make, the applications on our smart phones or the data recorders that the vehicles we travel in increasingly carry around to record their movements. If enough information is available and the government has it or can have it, anonymity is impossible, both in regard to individuals and to the interconnections between people.

Revealing publicly what the NSA was doing with the massive information for President Obama has led to the pursuit of Edward Snowden, a pursuit that reached an almost unbelievable extreme, such as when, as a result of pressure from the U.S., a number of European countries denied permission to the Bolivian President Evo Morales to fly over their airspace. The U.S. did not succeed in capturing Snowden, but the lesson was clear: “Do the crime, do the time.” Snowden is already an outcast in much of the world, and his freedom to move around is minimal.

This unfortunate case has shown the double-sidedness of President Obama, an excellent speaker who has given noble and moving speeches that seemed to make him one of those beacons of defending freedom and international understanding that we really need. Coming to mind at this point, we remember that his first day in office he ordered leaders of federal agencies to disclose all information possible, leading to the establishment of the website data.gov, whose contents grew rapidly from 47 databases in 2009 to about 450,000 upon reaching its third anniversary in July 2012.

The deceitfulness of President Obama — the use of current technology that creates or allows us to create enormous possibilities — is also seen with drones, which fits perfectly with a policy that the president has been seeking to implement, that is, to focus on limited targets. The use of drones on missions has increased 200 percent during his command. When drone technology spreads throughout the world — and it will — on what grounds can we accuse other countries when they use them for their own causes?

When an American squad killed, or rather executed, Osama bin Laden, the good that should have come out of eliminating a terrorist such as he did not necessarily compensate for the violations that occurred during such an act on foreign soil. What seems particularly distasteful is the celebrated photo of President Obama seen with members of his cabinet and military commanders witnessing the operation live — another technological resource. Spreading this photo helped to make bin Laden’s death a spectacle. It is worth remembering at this moment the phrase from Sebastian Castellio after the execution of Servetus by Calvinists in 1533: “To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.”

Nor should we forget that if he has defended the need for efforts to fight climate change, he has also authorized plans to drill in Alaska in search of gas and oil reserves.

Barack Obama has enjoyed, like few politicians before him, such great credit. Not even a year in office and already he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Little had been done yet because little could have been done in so little time, yet much was expected of him. After starting his second term, some of us have painfully abandoned these hopes. It is true he has had to fight against the Republican Party and consequently the prison cells in Guantanamo still have not been emptied out, but there are many stories: While he has done everything possible to stop North Korea and Iran from producing nuclear bombs, the president, like his predecessors, has never mentioned a word claiming that Israel has an atomic arsenal.

Now, and not without reason, Barack defends selectively attacking Syria; but when he was a senator, he denounced the invasion of Iraq in a speech (Oct. 2, 2009), calling it a “dumb war.” It is easier, obviously, to justify acts such as the attack on Syria than it is to chase Snowden, but as was shown on the front cover of Time on Sept. 9, “Barack Obama ran for president to get the U.S. out of wars, not into them.” The universal Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the compelling and moving speaker, has simply given way to the U.S. president — certainly a better president than many before him — the defender of an American peace that has been lost, that does not necessarily fit in with the interests and desires of other countries nor with defending universal values — something particularly necessary in times like these when technology, while changing the world, threatens these very values whose creation and maintenance requires much effort.

José Manuel Sánchez Ron is a member of the Real Academia Española and a professor of the History of Science at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid.