[LINK] Chomsky: Fight NSA spying or be 'complicit'

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

One doesn't need to be a radical to find this unacceptable ..

Chomsky: Fight back against NSA spying or be 'complicit'

US citizens' freedoms were 'won by popular struggle' and should be defended 
the same way, the MIT professor and linguist says

Chris Kanaracus (IDG News Service)15 November, 2013 21:55
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/532020/chomsky_fight_back_against_nsa_spyi
ng_complicit_/

Now that the extent of the U.S. National Security Agency's surveillance 
programs has been exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, it's 
beholden on the public to fight back or else find themselves "complicit" in 
the activities, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
linguistics professor and philosopher Noam Chomsky.

The freedoms U.S. citizens have "weren't granted by gifts from above," 
Chomsky said during a panel discussion Friday at MIT. "They were won by 
popular struggle."

While U.S. officials have long cited national security as a rationale for 
domestic surveillance programs, that same argument has been used by the 
"most monstrous systems" in history, such as the Stasi secret police in the 
former East Germany, Chomsky said.

"The difference with the totalitarian states is the citizens couldn't do a 
lot about it," in contrast to the U.S., he added. "If we do not expose the 
plea of security and separate the parts that are valid from the parts that 
are not valid, then we are complicit."

He cited the still-in-development Trans-Pacific Partnership trade 
agreement, which critics say could have far-reaching implications for 
Internet use and intellectual property. Wikileaks recently posted a draft 
of the treaty's chapter on intellectual property.

Now that the information is out there, "we can do something about [the 
proposed TPP]," Chomsky said.

What's needed for sure "is a serious debate about what the lines should be" 
when it comes to government surveillance, said investigative reporter 
Barton Gellman, who has received NSA document leaks from Snowden, leading 
to a series of stories this year in the Washington Post. "Knowledge is 
power and it's much easier to win if the other side doesn't know there's a 
game."

"We can be confident that any system of power is going to try to use the 
best available technology to control and dominate and maximize their 
power," Chomsky said. "We can also be confident ... that they want to do it 
in secret."

But there's a crucial difference between the U.S. activities and that of 
the Stasi, Gellman said. "The Stasi was knowingly, deliberately and 
cautiously squashing dissent," he said. "I don't think that's what we're 
seeing here at all."

A smartphone is an excellent tracking device "from my location, to who I 
communicate with, to what I search for," he said while holding up his 
personal device. "I am paying Verizon Wireless on the order of [US]$1,000 a 
year for this."

Meanwhile, although telcos are making money by selling phone users' 
personal information to third parties, at the same time "the NSA could not 
do part of its job as efficiently if the companies weren't selling and 
retaining [customer] data," Gellman said.

Company disclosures and terms of service have limited benefit as well. 
"Generally the terms of service are written to say we can do whatever we 
want, in a lot of words," he said. Even if a customer reads through 
carefully and notes what pledges are being made, "you have no way of 
monitoring what they do," Gellman added.

Since publishing stories on the NSA surveillance programs, Gellman has 
stepped up his personal privacy efforts significantly, through "layered 
defenses" including "locked rooms, safes, and air-gapped computers that 
never have and never will touch the 'net," he said. The extra steps are "a 
giant tax on my time," Gellman added.

It's not clear how many more revelations will come to light from the 
materials Snowden gave Gellman and other journalists. Snowden reportedly 
gave reporters up to 200,000
documents.

Message sent using MelbPC WebMail Server