Spies, Freedom and Unity

             As Edward J. Snowden slinks like an old-school spy through China and Russia to who knows where, and as we all become inured to the fact the National Security Administration knows about each of our impulse Best Buy purchases and how often (or not) we call our mothers, I am reminded of Vermont’s State Motto, Freedom and Unity, and Independence Day.

Vermont’s motto was adopted in 1788. Ira Allen melded it into his design for the Great Seal of the Vermont Republic.  The State Legislature readopted it when Vermont joined the fragile Union in 1791.

It means, of course, finding that balance between individual liberty – the right to do whatever we darn well please, damn the consequences, and the need to act as a whole to protect things like, well, liberty, which sometimes requires us to give up some, uh, freedom. This post is about how we are testing that balance.

The nightmare that is the past twelve years has tested the equation between liberty and government. We ask our government not to allow whack jobs to slip through and blow us up and, at the same time, we want the government to let us get on with our lives. To this end we, the people, tolerate full body scans at airports and other indignities. At the same time the US is testing the limits of infringing the liberty of us citizens, we seem to be going whole hog to learn all we can about what everyone else in the world is doing. 

The newest indignity, shown to us in power point slides by Edward J. Snowden, includes a vast network of computers, programmers and analysts tracking our every move and act on line – oh, no, that’s just every private Internet business from Google to Zappos and is a different story. 

What the NSA has done is aggregate our cell call and browsing data in such a way they can (they think) tell when the US is under potential assault. They do this through secret warrants granted by secret courts, which is ironic, because similar if analog invasive searches are what led to the founding of this country in the first place. And this makes me think about the Fourth of July.

American Independence Day celebrates our declaration against distant rule by a foreign power. That Declaration of Independence led to freedom from random acts of power and the abuse of our “unalienable rights.” 

The Declaration of Independence is a good read. It is Googleable, which is ironic in this context.  You can also read the whole thing on the Fourth if you buy the New York Times.  Someone each year buys a full-page ad in the Times and runs the original text.  Read it with the kids on the porch over coffee in the bright summer sun. It is interesting.

Among the rights we declared unalienable is the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. I’m no Supreme Court Justice, but in the case of the NSA and its grab of vast authority to strip and store data about each and every one of us it seems we’ve crossed a line.

It is complicated though and it comes back to not wanting to be blown up. It is complicated as well because we are not the only ones who want some basic freedoms.

 People the world over live in risk of being blown up and, more fundamentally, not having drinkable water or any money or any freedom. Rightly or wrongly politicians and clerics the world over make out it is our fault, the United State's fault, people live in misery and under tyranny.  They blame us, attack us, we attack them and we give up basic freedoms in the cause of safety. They then attack us more for using drones and sending John Kerry to visit their countries. It is a vicious and tragic cycle we don’t really want to understand or address – we just want to be able to do whatever the heck we want whenever we want.

So we spend all this money on war and surveillance and then a twenty-nine year old intelligence analyst grabs some computers and jump drives and calls the Guardian to tell us about the dragnet combing our conversations and Internet searches. It gives us pause. We are conflicted.

This is the spy caper I started with. Urgent meetings in Hong Kong over pizza and coke, where the local government quietly, through intermediaries, makes clear Snowden has safe passage out and he is whisked through the city and walks right onto a flight just like everyone else. As Snowden flies away the Hong Kong authorities dillydally over ‘technical questions’ about the US extradition request. We are caught flat-footed.

In Russia it does not get better.  John Kerry whines like a siren and Putin smirks. The Russians are having so much fun and it is up to Ecuadorian Foreign Minister, Ricardo Patiño, to give us the one liner putting the saga in perspective: “The one who is denounced pursues the denouncer.” Snowden is himself so dedicated to his quest he is spending vast amounts of time in an airport waiting area - a worse fate than purgatory or American prison.

We are all half rooting for the guy, even China and Russia, those vast lovers of Internet freedom, and we are being made to think about what we are giving up, what direction we are heading.

Which brings us back to the Fourth of July and Vermont’s State Motto.  Next week we celebrate a heck of a long run as a free, democratic society.  We celebrate the balance between freedom and unity. 

As we celebrate – with parades, beer, fireworks, barbeque, motorcycles, firearms, music, with whatever we want really – we should think about the balance between Freedom and Unity and whether we have lost it.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2013 David Rocchio