With nations around the world screaming bloody murder over U.S. surveillance and the loss of privacy it represents, should they instead embrace and build upon the inevitable changes it reflects? For O Globo, filmmaker Caca Diegues, in one of the more profound comments on the subject so far, writes that in this brave new world without secrets, Brazilians and other peoples should pivot and develop their own ways of not only protecting themselves from spying, but create societies that beneficially mesh the old world with the new.
For O Globo, Caca Diegues writes in part:
Although the target of righteous indignation, global espionage by way of sophisticated cyber processes has long stopped being a novelty among nations. It is merely a technological breakthrough in the listening systems that nations have forever used on others. … Every time a scandal like this comes up, nothing in the world changes except for sales of Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, with his Big Brother that sees everything.
What is new and noteworthy is that this is no longer about military, political or economic espionage alone, but the type that throws open a world in which privacy no longer exists. It has been coming since Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet, a digital communications system that could survive the nuclear apocalypse regarded as inevitable during the Cold War. Whatever happened, everyone and everything would remain forever connected via this network impossible to undo – which is just the way it turned out.
Today, a fabulous satellite like Hubble 3D reveals to us the existence of a blue planet like Earth, HD189733, in a galaxy incredibly distant from our solar system. In the macro and the micro, we are condemned to the end of all disguises and mysteries.
Even being a space vulnerable to irresponsibility, the Internet is a celebration of individual liberty and a progressive form of relationship and fellowship. One does not wish to see it suffer from restriction, whether it is under authoritarian state control or not, or disappear (which is already impossible). For this, perhaps, we are paying the price of risking exposure of our communities and private lives. And it is difficult to find ways of avoiding this anxiety. Perhaps we will have to learn – I don’t know how – to just live with it.
According to the great neuroscientist Antonio Damásio, ‘Our politics is part of biological evolution.’ If we fail to understand this and build our democracy based on it, Edward Snowden’s personal sacrifice will have been in vain.
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