Repressors for Liberty!

Edward Snowden -
on his way to Caracas?

NSA leaker Edward Snowden is apparently looking for asylum in Venezuela - if he can get there (this Washpost article details the geographical challenges). But if and when he arrives in Caracas, Snowden will find that Venezuela's chavista government contradicts many of the civil libertarian and press freedom values Snowden holds dear.

I hope Snowden makes it to some safe harbor. He's a courageous guy, who's done us a service by exposing the U.S. government's pervasive and virtually unsupervised snooping apparatus. Government espionage is useful and invevitable.

A Venezulan newspaper protests government censorship.

But, collect everybody's information all the time - just in case it's useful someday? Administer the secret system with a secret court whose judges give the spyers almost everything they ask for? That's the formula for trampling dissent whenever a Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover gets his paws on that data.

'Media Being Asphixiated' in Venezuela.
A protest by the
 Institute of Press and Society.

I'd hate to see Snowden, who did society an important service at great personal risk, thrown into a cell, humiliated and put on trial like Bradley Manning. But I also dread the prospect of him being trotted out in chavista propaganda pieces, enabling one of the planet's more repressive governments to claim to be a defender of freedom.

Under President Chavez and his succesor Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan government has systematically intimdated, economically strangled and straight-out shut down opposition media. The two most recent to go have been the opposition TV channel Globovision and the independent Cadena Capriles media group, both recently sold to owners who are apparently close to the government. Previously, the government had forced the vehemently hostile RCTV off of the air. The chavistas have eliminated nearly all checks and balances, enabling them to trample on civil rights.

Venezuelans protest the closing of RCTV,
Venezuela's oldest television station and a harsh government critic.

It's no surprise, therefore, that Freedom House rated Venezuela's media 'Not free' and called its media environment "repressive."

"While freedoms of speech and the press are constitutionally guaranteed, the legal environment is characterized by standing threats of arbitrary detention, charges, fines, and sentences, as well as license manipulation and other administrative harassment aimed at opposition media, primarily broadcast stations and daily newspapers," Freedom House wrote.

For its part, the Inter American Press Association condemned "the progressive elimination of independent media" in Venezuela.

'Snowden's Latin American Defenders Don't Lead by
Example,' says the Wall Street Journal.

Combine Venezuela's muzzled press with its court system which has lost all pretense of independence from government, and you've got the ingredients for a police state - making the US's espionage system appear free and open. In fact, the Venezuelan government has made a habit of recording, editing and broadcasting private conversations between opposition leaders.

As for Ecaudor, another possible Snowden destination, Freedome House wrote: "Ecuador declined from Partly Free to Not Free due to government-sponsored regulations that severely restricted media coverage of electoral campaigns, President Rafael Correa’s directive to withdraw government advertising from privately owned media that are critical of the government, and a general reduction in political and investigative reporting due to an increasingly hostile environment for the press created by the Correa government."

And Freedom House published that condemnation even before this year's Ecuadorean press law, which turned newspapers into 'public service utilities', enabling the government to control their content.

As badly as the U.S.'s espionage has played overseas, Washington compounded this p.r. disaster with its heavyhanded efforts to stop and search Bolivian Pres. Evo Morales' plane on its way home from Russia. And the latest revelations of U.S. spying in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico will only mean more regional sympathy for Venezuela and the chavistas.

An ambitious reporter with El Tiempo
changed Snowden's ex-employer to the CIA.

Terrorism is horrific, but the number of terrorism victims in the United States is miniscule compared to scourges which much of society seems to have accepted, such as highway deaths and gun fatalities. Rather than establishing a massive, astronomically expensive surveillance system to hunt down a principled young man, the U.S. (and Colombia) could save many more lives by making guns and cars safer, not to mention providing better infant and child nutrition.

Needless to say, and as many have pointed out, by creating a huge, potentially repressive state security apparatus, we're doing the terrorists' work for them. I suspect that Venezuela would not be Snowden's first choice. But it's understandable that he'd prefer even an authoritarian state to prison in the United States.

I just hope that snowden, who seems principled and courageous, will have the backbone to denounce the repressive acts of his new hosts.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

On Prism and Puma and Trusting Government

In February 1782 a group of wealthy criollos met in Caracas to conspire revolution against Spain, which had become increasingly repressive against its American colonists. The group then sent a letter to dissident colonel Francisco de Miranda urging rebellion.

The Spanish are "treating all Americans, of whatever class, rank or circumstance, like miserable slaves," the conspirators wrote.

The letter was premature. The group never acted, and its leader, Don Juan Vicente Bolívar, died four years later. But how might history have been different if the Spanish authorities had had an effective espionage system, intercepted the letter and imprisoned or executed the conspirators? In that case, Don Juan Vicente's youngest son, Simon Bolivar, might not have been born at all and grown up to lead the armies which overthrew the Spanish empire.

A slide about the U.S.'s Prism program released by Edward Stanton.

That's why the new era of government surveillance programs using the Internet - called Puma in Colombia and Prism in the United States - as well as their flip side of government propaganda - should give us all pause.

It's not an abstract fear. Historians have observed how the rise of radio and television during the 1900s facilitated totalitarian regimes on both left and right.

And the Internet is a much more subtle, flexible and potentially insidious tool for both eavesdropping and propaganda than either radio or TV.

Colombia's espionage program, called Puma, is intended to enable the government to monitor e-mail accounts and social media such as Twitter and Facebook. And a decree issued last year with little public notice requires cell phone companies to store their users' information, including phone, I.D. numbers and physical locations for as long as five years. With a single judge's order, the government may monitor calls for as long as six months. The decree even requires phone companies to provide the government access to their networks to gather information.

That's really scary.

If Channel 4 goes dark, we know something's wrong. But if a certain anti-government website disappears or is altered, we may never notice. If the government shutters the newspapers, as Colombia's last dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla did shortly before being overthrown, the public rebels. But if an e-mail doesn't arrive, you might not even realize it.

Governments will always, and justifiably, do espionage and propaganda. But governments abuse their powers, as demonstrated in the U.S. by Watergate and in Colombia by the chuzadas scandal, in which ex-Pres. Uribe used the DAS to spy on the Supreme Court, journalists and many others.

That's why government espionage and propaganda require lots of transparency and public control, and why I believe that Eduard Snowden did a great service to us all by revealing the U.S.'s NSA programs. (In fact, I don't think that Snowden revealed all that much to potential terrorists. After all, they'd have to have been pretty stupid to believe that the U.S. government wouldn't snoop on their Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail accounts.)

Colombians like to say that 'He who owes nothing, fears nothing.' But we all value our privacy. And, nobody know what future governments might do. Permitting the government to collect immense amounts of personal information about us with little oversight is trusting way too much, as far as I'm concerned, for an institution which has historically abused its powers.

As Snowden said: "Even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded.

"You don't have to have done anything wrong. You just have to eventually fall under the suspicion of somebody - even by a wrong call. And they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."

Of course, and in contrast to TV and radio, the Internet works in two directions. Once upon a time only the Hearsts and Bloombergs could offer their opinions across the world. Today, any fool with a blog can do it, albeit not with the same attention.

Governments can use the Internet to do espionage and manipulate public opinion. But the Internet's prevalence and power enable people like Manning and Snowden to steal information and spread it around the world. And the Internet has helped Arabs, Turks, Brazilians and Bulgarians to organize protests against their governments.

That's why authoritarian governments either restrict Internet use, like Cuba and North Korea, or allow widespread Internet access and try to control it, as does China.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours