New York – Eddie Snowden has unleashed into the sunlight a core shadowy principle of statecraft, which Ronald Reagan, in the midst of his warm engagement with Mikhail Gorbachev seeking to end the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, used a Russian proverb translated as: Trust, but verify. Short of soldiers and bullets, is there a better way to protect sovereignty and public safety than “looking,” aka spying? The answer to the former is an easy “no,” but to the latter is split – threats from foreigners are “easier,” but homegrown threats have Constitutional bars, and hence, are “tougher.”
Upon learning the name PRISM, Europe has reacted with Casablanca-like feigned shock and protested, to help those in their own public squares feel good, and in so doing kept the distance between statecraft and internal democracy intact. Only India has acted with reasoned sanity in accepting cyber-security, knowing that social media is forcibly shortening the necessary distance between statecraft and democracy, thereby forcing every government and its leaders to speak more truth, more often, to their own better-informed and better-connected citizenry.
To those confused by the Arab Spring and effects of social media, it is quite simple: the citizenry is better informed and better connected, and will no longer buy “the moon is made of blue cheese,” or worse, calculated and instigated hate at neighbors or neighboring countries as a distraction, with the notable exception of Syria’s Assad, who has successfully unleashed sectarian violence to drown out the discontent-based Arab Spring. Instead, citizenry will use its better understanding and connectivity to make governments perish that don’t honor Lincoln’s promise during his 1863 Gettysburg Address of “government …for the people…”. Just ask Egypt’s Morsi when Tahrir Square was refilled with proud Egyptians holding their government to account well before the election cycle, and welcomed the military’s overthrow of Morsi and installation of Chief Justice Adli Mansour as Interim President (no relation to Palestine’s UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour). The better informed citizenry is harder to please with platitudes, and harder to govern when the floor of basic human existence is breached with tanking economies – again, ask Morsi.
To make matters worse for governance, social media, in addition to television and movies, has created a higher expectation in every human being of his/her basic rights and needs. In another 25 years or so, it will reach a near-universally accepted standard, such that what one is paid in New York for a particular task will be similarly paid in Seoul, Beijing, Tokyo, Mumbai, Jerusalem, Moscow, Cairo, Berlin, Palermo, Madrid, Rio, Toronto, Sidney, Cape Town and Casablanca. It would be as if the AFL-CIO had negotiated a global salary for all labor. Just “imagine,” as John Lennon warned, what that would do to all governments who are forced to do more good more efficiently to more people – it would be as if the rules of capitalism and corporate governance were applied to sovereign governments. Accountability, per GAAP. Just imagine.
Now, turning to PRISM and listening to embassies of friends and foe alike, anyone not watching embassies of other nations ought to be fired by their citizens, for the first order of business for any government, at any time in history, is to protect public safety from enemies foreign and domestic. That requires keeping your eyes open, at all times. So, looking and listening of embassies is good and needed. PRISM, on the other hand, is a very mild act of looking at a sender’s and a recipient’s email address, that’s it. No different than looking at a sealed envelope sent through the postal service (unlike a post card, which has open contents – but, which converting envelope to postcard-power is available to Google, Microsoft and all other ISPs, including, Rediff mail in India, as they can and do read email contents). What makes PRISM hot and heavy isn’t the email addresses, but the ability to remember them all, forever, and calculate nearly infinite permutations from them that generates an alert of danger-possibilities. It is akin to a really perfect card counter, like Dustin Hoffman in the movie “Rain Man,” playing blackjack at a casino and winning each time, as he could remember what had come and what was left in the card shoe. Pretty cool; and, pretty normal and legal, even as casinos hate it.
The United States, as a friend to many, armed with PRISM knowledge, alerts other nations of possible danger from terror; friends looking out for friends. Indeed, other nations have warned the United States of possible danger to us, from their intelligence activities – again, friends looking out for friends. Indeed, this kind of help can convert an enemy into a friend! In any event, the right response to such help is a “Thank you,” not friend-bashing.
Left for last, is the right of privacy. This is a confusing topic, if one isn’t careful. The right of privacy – large, medium and small – is an individual’s right against one’s government, corporate defalcation and foreign government. Rules of contract govern the dispute between a citizen and a corporation. It is what it is, unless the public policy says otherwise. As to one’s own government, in the United States we have the Fourth Amendment against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is well developed and privacy is at its “strongest.” Lastly, an individual’s rights against a foreign government run smack into the sovereign immunity of the intruding government, leaving the individual to ask their own government to complain to the intruder-government, as permitted in the comity of nations.
A parting thought on privacy. Most citizens, natural and corporate, have ripped any privacy from any public space by installing security cameras, microphones, etc., and broadcasting it on the web. People, voluntarily, driven to be celebrity-like, have made Facebook and Twitter billions while giving up privacy over private acts and private thoughts. Perhaps what is left somewhat private is an unspoken thought or an idea yet-not-born. But PRISM like programs can already predict which fork in the road down yonder you will likely take, or if a shopper in a store is a mere “looker” or a real “buyer.”
As to Snowden, he lost all principle, credibility and civic martyrdom when he left America to bash it. To drive home that point is none other than the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, telling Snowden that he ought to stop anti-American activities and deeming his asylum application withdrawn. Not since the city-state of Athens, has society endured chaotic democracy (mob rule) in its pure direct citizen-vote manner. Society has chosen republics as a better model. Over time, statecraft relied upon different tactics. Rome used “Bread and Circus” and Maximilien de Robespierre used Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; each, a friendly reminder of resident evil at any spot of the governance spectrum. With the representative form of republican government, statecraft is vital and necessary, and needs the governmental privacy that Snowden breached – deliberation privilege, along with the executive, legislative and judicial privileges, to function.
The ultimate danger is that social media has the ability, in citizen-hands, to do to governments what a government can do with PRISM to citizens or foreigners. Lurking, in the shadows is chaos emanating from converting representative governments into direct citizenship-democracy of the city-state of Athens. The ultimate answer may well reside in the hard line of freedom drawn across history by Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, subscribed by the brave, for it led to the hallowed Constitution and its goal “…to form a more perfect union.” The world, given its digital shrinkage, requires us all to “form a more perfect world.”
Happy Birthday America!
Ravi Batra, Esq.
Ravi Batra, starting September 11, 2021, is a publisher ofThe America Times Company Ltd., and since January 2022, is the Editor-in-Chief. He is a member of the National Press Club, in Washington D.C., and a member of its "Freedom of the Press" and "International Correspondents" Teams/Committees.
A member of the bar since 1981, he is the head of a boutique law firm in Manhattan, The Law Firm of Ravi Batra, P.C., that handles complex constitutional, sovereignty, torture, civil and criminal cases, representing governments, corporates and individuals, with landmark legal victories, including, libel in fiction, in “Batra v. Dick Wolf.” He is Chairman & CEO, Greenstar Global Energy Corp., King Danylo of Galicia International Ltd., Mars & Pax Advisors, Ltd., Chairman of National Advisory Council on South Asian Affairs, and since September 2021, Advisor for Legal and Humanitarian Affairs to the Permanent Mission of Georgia to the United Nations. He is invited by various governments to address High Level Ministerial events, including, on Counter-Terrorism, including, Astana (Nur-Sultan), Dushanbe, Minsk and Delhi. He has testified in Congress as an invitee of the Chair, U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, and interacted with U.S. Department of State from 1984 -1990, and then again, from 2006, during the tenures of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo and Antony Blinken.
He has served as Commissioner of New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE), Trustee on New York State IOLA Board, New York State Judicial Screening Committee for the Second Judicial Department, City Bar’s Judicial Committee, Vice-Chair of Kings County Democratic County Committee’s Independent Judicial Screening Committee for the then-2nd Judicial Department of Brooklyn and Staten Island, Chair of NYSTLA’ Judicial Independence Committee, with many more bar leadership roles, including, NYSBA’s House of Delegates for four years. He has served as Advisor for Legal & Human Rights Affairs to the Permanent Mission of Ukraine post-annexation of Crimea till 2021, and Legal Advisor to numerous nations’ permanent missions to the U. N. since 2009, including, India, Pakistan, Honduras and Malta. He has served: as Global Special Counsel to The Antonov Company in Ukraine, a state-owned company, and was registered with the Justice Dept pursuant to FARA; and as Special Global Advisor to Rector/President of both - National Aviation University of Ukraine and National Technical University of Ukraine/KPI. He remains involved in geopolitics and public policy since the mid-1980's, starting with being on House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s Speaker’s Club and appointed member of NACSAA during President Ronald Reagan’s tenure. In 1988, he was part of U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese’s Delegation to Japan to resolve bilateral trade imbalance. He regularly interacts with the multilateral diplomatic community, and during the High Level UNGA Debate, with heads of State/Government. He is sought for his views as a speaker and writer.