Article
This article , posted in the New York Times, pretty much sums up my opinion about Edward Snowden and other whistle blowers. Since I have noticed that articles like this tend to vanish at a time, I am not only hot linking to it , but copying it in full , for future reference.
I hate when my favorite articles just vanish. Feel free to hit the "article" link above and give them a few eye ball views for their advertising revenue.
The Banality of Systemic Evil
By PETER LUDLOW
In recent months there has been a visible struggle in the media to
come to grips with the leaking, whistle-blowing and hacktivism that has
vexed the United States military and the private and government
intelligence communities. This response has run the gamut. It has
involved attempts to condemn, support, demonize, psychoanalyze and in
some cases canonize figures like Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Chelsea
Manning and Edward Snowden.
In broad terms, commentators in the mainstream and corporate media
have tended to assume that all of these actors needed to be brought to
justice, while independent players on the Internet and elsewhere have
been much more supportive. Tellingly, a recent Time magazine cover story
has pointed out a marked generational difference in how people view
these matters: 70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said
they believed that Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.
So has the younger generation lost its moral compass?
No. In my view, just the opposite.
Clearly, there is a moral principle at work in the actions of the
leakers, whistle-blowers and hacktivists and those who support them. I
would also argue that that moral principle has been clearly articulated,
and it may just save us from a dystopian future.
In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” one of the most poignant and important
works of 20th-century philosophy, Hannah Arendt made an observation
about what she called “the banality of evil.” One interpretation of this
holds that it was not an observation about what a regular guy Adolf
Eichmann seemed to be, but rather a statement about what happens when
people play their “proper” roles within a system, following prescribed
conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral
consequences of what the system was doing — or at least
compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.
A good illustration of this phenomenon appears in “Moral Mazes,” a
book by the sociologist Robert Jackall that explored the ethics of
decision making within several corporate bureaucracies. In it, Jackall
made several observations that dovetailed with those of Arendt. The
mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their
everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate
moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of
corporate life”:
(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss
what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants
dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it.
(4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what
he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5)
Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want
reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your
mouth shut.
Jackall went through case after case in which managers violated this
code and were drummed out of a business (for example, for reporting
wrongdoing in the cleanup at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant).
Aaron Swartz counted “Moral Mazes” among his “very favorite books.”
Swartz was the Internet wunderkind who was hounded by a government
prosecution threatening him with 35 years in jail for illicitly
downloading academic journals that were behind a pay wall. Swartz, who
committed suicide in January at age 26 (many believe because of his
prosecution), said that “Moral Mazes” did an excellent job of “
explaining how so many well-intentioned people can end up committing so much evil.”
Swartz argued that it was sometimes necessary to break the rules that
required obedience to the system in order to avoid systemic evil. In
Swartz’s case the system was not a corporation but a system for the
dissemination of bottled up knowledge that should have been available to
all. Swartz engaged in an act of civil disobedience to liberate that
knowledge, arguing that “
there is no justice in following unjust laws.
It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil
disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture.”
Chelsea Manning, the United States Army private incarcerated for
leaking classified documents from the Departments of Defense and State,
felt a similar pull to resist the internal rules of the bureaucracy. In a
statement at her trial she described a case where she felt this was
necessary. In February 2010, she received a report of an event in which
the Iraqi Federal Police had detained 15 people for printing
“anti-Iraqi” literature. Upon investigating the matter, Manning
discovered that none of the 15 had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions
or suspected terrorist organizations. Manning had the allegedly
anti-Iraqi literature translated and found that, contrary to what the
federal police had said, the published literature in question “detailed
corruption within the cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s
government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi
people.”
When Manning reported this discrepancy to the officer in charge (OIC), she was told to “drop it,” she recounted.
Manning could not play along. As she put it, she knew if she
“continued to assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the
political opponents of Prime Minister al-Maliki, those people would be
arrested and in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal
Police and very likely tortured and not seen again for a very long time —
if ever.” When her superiors would not address the problem, she was
compelled to
pass this information on to WikiLeaks.
Snowden too felt that, confronting what was clearly wrong, he could
not play his proper role within the bureaucracy of the intelligence
community. As he put it,
[W]hen you talk to people about [abuses] in a place like
this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take
them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness
of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about
[them]. And the more you talk about [them] the more you’re ignored. The
more you’re told it’s not a problem until eventually you realize that
these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who
was simply hired by the government.
The bureaucracy was telling him to shut up and move on (in accord
with the five rules in “Moral Mazes”), but Snowden felt that doing so
was
morally wrong.
In a June
Op-Ed in The Times,
David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak
information about the Prism surveillance program. His reasoning cleanly
framed the alternative to the moral code endorsed by Swartz, Manning and
Snowden. “For society to function well,” he wrote, “there have to be
basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and
deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret
N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.”
The complaint is eerily parallel to one from a case discussed in
“Moral Mazes,” where an accountant was dismissed because he insisted on
reporting “irregular payments, doctored invoices, and shuffling
numbers.” The complaint against the accountant by the other managers of
his company was that “by insisting on his own moral purity … he eroded
the fundamental trust and understanding that makes cooperative
managerial work possible.”
But wasn’t there arrogance or hubris in Snowden’s and Manning’s
decisions to leak the documents? After all, weren’t there established
procedures determining what was right further up the organizational
chart? Weren’t these ethical decisions better left to someone with a
higher pay grade? The former United States ambassador to the United
Nations, John Bolton, argued that Snowden “thinks he’s smarter and has a
higher morality than the rest of us … that he can see clearer than
other 299, 999, 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say
that is the
worst form of treason.”
For the leaker and whistleblower the answer to Bolton is that there
can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own
accord. Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the
system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational
niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s
assigned organizational role. The chief executive is not in a better
position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or,
for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not
require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision.
Persons of conscience who step outside their assigned organizational
roles are not new. There are many famous earlier examples, including
Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers), John Kiriakou (of the Central
Intelligence Agency) and several former N.S.A. employees, who blew the
whistle on what they saw as an unconstitutional and immoral surveillance
program (William Binney, Russ Tice and Thomas Drake, for example). But
it seems that we are witnessing a new generation of whistleblowers and
leakers, which we might call generation W (for the generation that came
of age in the era WikiLeaks, and now the war on whistleblowing).
The media’s desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is
natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way
that they, members of the corporate media, would not. But sauce for the
goose is sauce for the gander; if there are psychological motivations
for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise
psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure
within a system — in this case a system in which corporate media plays
an important role. Similarly it is possible that the system itself is
sick, even though the actors within the organization are behaving in
accord with organizational etiquette and respecting the internal bonds
of trust.
Just as Hannah Arendt saw that the combined action of loyal managers
can give rise to unspeakable systemic evil, so too generation W has seen
that complicity within the surveillance state can give rise to evil as
well — not the horrific evil that Eichmann’s bureaucratic efficiency
brought us, but still an Orwellian future that must be avoided at all
costs.
---- end article , begin my own ranting ----
"For the leaker and whistleblower the answer to Bolton is that there
can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own
accord."
This statement dovetails into my primary complaint against the USA spying on the whole world. How can The System (the United States) act morally in a situation where they are openly abusing non-voters (non usa citizens) . They are unelected , they have no motivation to stop at all. They have USA Senators caught on camera lying to the american public , people who can get them booted out of office. And you think they're going to be truthful to people whom are powerless to stop them from abusing anything they feel like abusing ?
No taxation without representation is the american principle. Only your elected officials can tax you ,not the evil british forieners (thus the boston tea party) . It extends to far more than just a monetary tax. It extends to any kind of burden you put on any people that you don't represent.
So yes, as Obama said , the Germans probably are listening in on German calls. But they are elected by the people of germany , and they can be booted out of power if they abuse the priviledge. But Americans listening in on German calls , 600 000 a month , and they're doing everything they can to expand that to the whole world ? There's no representation. There's nothing the german people , the people of the world who are not USA citizens , can do to take these people to task for it when they mess up.
And these are their allies they are doing this to , not their mortal enemies that they are at war with.
this is not acceptable. I demand they stop.
And I know full well they won't.
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