Lady of the Night - Maryam Sarah Javid

A girl ghostly white
Strode out alone into the night

Stillness prevailed there
No sign of any wind to blow away her despair

She appreciated a rose, its color light yellow
Was it also abandoned by its fellows?

She flicked it aside
A rose diminished of its pride

She came to a standstill
She no longer had the will
To let her thoughts spill

Frustrated she cried
Like a jilted bride

She looked up, darkness had consumed all beauty
The sky was darker than a chimney thats sooty

But she looked again and saw a beam
Then two, three, four more formed a team

No, the night was not diminished of its beauty
For four stars still performed their duty

NSA and Privacy

Thanks to Edward Snowden, the continuing and almost continuous drip of NSA revelations over the last few months has starkly revealed the massive erosion of privacy that has taken place in the last 10 years. This is a major and in my view massively negative development.

Our societies are built on an expectation of a reasonable amount of privacy. While all of us recognize that communal living precludes total anonymity, we don't expect all our conversations, messages, emails, thoughts, whatever to be accessible to total strangers. The expectation is that whatever aspect of our personal and family lives we choose to share is done on a voluntary basis. The freedoms that Western societies take for granted and that people in many parts of the world aspire to are contingent on this  minimum expectation of the levels of privacy available to us. When these levels are breached, people feel betrayed and violated. So why is this notion of privacy so important? The answer lies in the kind of society we want to live in.

Democratic societies have massive flaws. They can be paralyzed and even hijacked by determined special interests. It is a pure myth that they are by nature peaceful. Some of the most destructive wars seen on the planet have been launched by democracies. However, they are also inherently robust and stable. When they largely function as they are supposed to, they tend to allow space to the people living in them to develop their own opinions and be able to voice them in reasonable safety. There is a level of trust present between citizens and between citizens and the state that translates into all areas of social, political and economic life. This trust is present because citizens in such societies have reasonable expectations of privacy.

Quasi democracies, absolute monarchies, dictatorships etc. on the other hand are much less robust and stable. As a result, they are also largely paranoid. This paranoia results because the man at the top of the heap always fears for his position. These societies tend to to be intrusive and try to minimize or ideally eliminate all notions of privacy for their citizens. As a result, there is a much lower level of trust between citizens and between citizens and the state. This lack of trust is reflected in turn in all areas of social, political and economic life.

The actions of the NSA have breached this level of trust. Granted that all nations have a duty to protect their citizens from external threats and in today's society, these threats also emanate in the digital realm. But the response to perceived threats is totally disproportionate to its magnitude. The type of violence that most countries in the world face is not sufficient to threaten their existence. So when governments behave as though all threats are existential - in other words when they become paranoid - they act to reduce both the level and the expectation of privacy amongst their citizens. Inevitably, this will result in lower levels of trust among the citizenry which will ultimately impact all aspects of society. The paradoxical effect is that efforts designed to preserve cherished freedoms and a hallowed and traditional sense of society and of one's place in it will result in undermining those same freedoms and that sense of self.

Related articles

• NSA's Secret War Against Online Privacy Seekers (sgtreport.com)
• Edward Snowden and NSA (rihara09.wordpress.com)
• Privacy Matters! (singingsanoritta.wordpress.com)
• The Internet: The NSA Circumvents User Privacy (guardianlv.com)