link to video below article
VIDEO: Interview with Edward Snowden on Silicon Valley Censorship,
Biden, and Lurking Press Freedom Dangers
How did we travel so far from the original vision of the internet as the one
place humans could communicate and organize free of state and corporate
control?
Glenn Greenwald
Nov 25
The NSA reporting of 2013, enabled by the heroic whistleblowing of Edward
Snowden, was widely perceived at the time time to be about violations of the
right to privacy. It was, of course, about that, but the revelations
implicated numerous other vital liberties, including free speech, a free
press, the need for transparency over state actors and especially the
always-lurking security state, and the dangers of allowing governments to
make the most consequential decisions in the dark, with no democratic
consent or accountability.
But the overarching cause uniting all of those specific concerns was a
belief in and defense of internet freedom. In one of the earliest interviews
we conducted with Snowden in Hong Kong, he explained that he was driven in
large part by the central, vital role which the early version of the
internet played in his life: one that was free of corporate and state
control, that permitted anonymity and exploration free of monitoring, and,
most of all, fostered unrestrained communication and dissemination of
information by and among citizens of the world without corporate and state
overlords regulating and controlling what they were saying.
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It was that Wild West vision of the internet that led so many to herald it
at its inception as one of the greatest and most potent innovations in
modern history for fostering individual freedom, human liberation,
empowerment of ordinary citizens, and the ability of people to organize and
communicate without having to depend on corporate giants and the governments
they fund and control. In many ways, that vision is a feint memory -
submersed in the mass surveillance Snowden exposed but which still persists,
the corporatization of the most influential online venues and, increasingly,
the control over the flow of speech and information by unseen oligarchical
overlords whose decrees require no identifiable rationale and afford no
appeal. The power of these unseen discourse-regulators is final, arbitrary
and absolute.
It does not have to be this way. A free internet is still worth fighting for
and is still salvageable. But it faces growing threats: from corporate media
outlets eager to suffocate anything that threatens their discourse-monopoly
by ginning up pressure on Silicon Valley to censor various dissidents and
independent voices even more so than they are now; from political parties
and politicians who wield great influence with tech giants and know they can
exploit that influence to silence their critics and adversaries; and the
increasing concentration of power over the internet in the hand of a few
monopolies whose power and wealth makes it irresistible for power centers to
try to harness to suffocate dissent.
On Monday I spoke with Snowden for a special episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, for
roughly 40 minutes about the growing dangers of Silicon Valley censorship,
why a tech industry that never wanted the power or responsibility to
regulate discourse has had that obligation foisted upon them by politicians
and journalists, the lurking dangers to press freedoms, and how a
Biden/Harris administration may make all of this worse:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qEuKCS-czU
