As Glenn Greenwald points out in his book No Place to Hide, reflecting on the harm of surveillance in society, “Only when we believe that nobody else is watching us do we feel free—safe—to truly experiment, to test boundaries, to explore new ways of thinking and being, to explore what it means to be ourselves. What made the internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration. For that reason, it is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate.”6
This point is crucial to sensibilising people on the use of codes and software for protecting privacy, improving tools of counter-surveillance and anonymity.
However, if we assume that today there is “No Place to Hide”, as proven by the global surveillance disclosures of Edward Snowden and other acts of whistleblow-ing described in this book, how can we imagine tactics of criticism and artistic experimentation that happen within a context of freedom of expression?
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On one side, the perception of constant surveillance might be a limitation to imagination. On the other side, if the idea of being surveilled became normalised, we could start imagining how to produce artistic explorations that come from within systems of monitoring and oppression.
There is an obvious risk in living with the perception of being monitored through pervasive surveillance. As Greenwald himself suggests, reconnecting his reflections with the ones of Michael Foucault in Discipline and Punish, “those who believe they are watched will instinctively choose to do that which is wanted of them without even realizing that they are being controlled.”7 In the context of debate over disclosures about state surveillance networks that function globally, the challenge becomes to find terrains of struggles and interventions, assuming we are all potentially watched.
As the hacktivist and researcher Jaromil writes in his abstract for the talk De-militarize technology: An insider’s critique of contemporary hacker politics, “On a sub-jective level, while we constantly risk becoming obsessed by revelations about the global surveillance panopticon and the military-industrial complex, we are also ex-posed to mass-deceiving propaganda and media manipulations, while even inter-personal communication becomes a field for the expanding narrative of total war.”8
What he advocates is to circumvent the shared “grim aura” of fear and individ-ualism through our capacity to imagine a better society, enhancing “the possibil-ity for a hacker subject to maintain integrpossibil-ity and seek a positive constituency for her relations” by growing socially oriented networks of trust. This implies a reflec-tion on collective empowerment, opening up the discourse of whistleblowing to a broader community of people.
In a panel at the Disruption Network Lab’s 2015 conference event SAMIZDATA:
Evidence of Conspiracy, Jacob Appelbaum observed that surveillance forces you to do things that you are asked to do. By normalising surveillance, we legitimise sys-temic power structures and asymmetries in society. As is widely known, Appel-baum has been in self-exile in Germany for the past eight years, unwilling to sub-mit himself to harassment from the US authorities for his previous involvement with WikiLeaks and his refusal to testify against Julian Assange in the context of the Grand Jury investigation against him. He points out that surveillance is only an aspect of a broader political structure, whilst the challenge is to work on lib-erating each other, provoking systemic changes: “Whistleblowing is a tactic but it is not a whole strategy, it is not enough on its own. We should find terrains of struggles in the information society.”9
On the same panel, speaking about information asymmetry, researcher on civil disobedience Theresa Züger pointed out that state and corporations gather information about us, but we don’t have information about how much we are sur-veilled: “Whistleblowing is breaking this, by directly intervening within politics,
and changing what we know. It is not only a symbolic gesture of disobedience, but people have taken enormous risks.”10
This debate relates to the necessity of collective empowerment and simultane-ously lowering risks, distributing the potential punishment and sharing informa-tion that only relatively few people have access to, as was pointed out in the early days of the debate on the Snowden Files.
The models of disclosing information we have witnessed over the past decade are diverse, from leaking the information to specific organisations, as whistle-blower Chelsea Manning did in 2010, passing her material to WikiLeaks; to ap-pointing specific people to filter information, as Edward Snowden chose to do in 2013, by trusting Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to receive and have access to the NSA documents; to leaking large information via BitTorrent and Mega, as happened in the 2015 case of the hack of the Hacker Team data by Phineas Fisher, and the reporting of evidence by Citizen Lab on the targeting of human rights activists via the surveillance software provided by the Hacking Team company; to the collaborative model adopted in the 2015-2016 Panama Papers investigation by Süddeutsche Zeitung journalists Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, con-necting with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to analyse the law firm documents, involving a multitude of journalists from more than one hundred media organisations in around eighty countries.
In the case of the Snowden Files, the Berlin-based journalist and curator Krystian Woznicki started a public debate in July 2014 with his article, “Open the Snowden Files! Raising New Issues of Public Interest”, attracting a signifi-cant amount of comments on the Berliner Gazette website.11 Woznicki argued that
“the access to the documents of the NSA-Gate remains closed” and “this blocks the democratic potential of the Snowden disclosures.”12 Laura Poitras, referring to her activity of reporting the Snowden disclosures and her contact with the source, pointed out that “it is a very justified criticism just in terms of how to scale the reporting, and it certainty has been a challenge, but it is also about how you build this kind of relationship and networks of trust, and they have been hard to bal-ance”—an issue that we have discussed further in the context of our recent inter-view for this book.13
In the chapter on the role of political media, “The Fourth Estate”, in his book No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald describes the power dynamics at stake when media subservient to government try to discredit him for reporting on sensitive issues and working with a source that disclosed classified information. Many parallel issues play a role: the trust of the source seeking to coordinate the reporting via specific journalists, the clear risk of punishment from the powers of government, and the sensitive choice of deciding what is appropriate to report and what is not.
At the end of his book, he writes:
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The prevailing institutions seem too powerful to challenge; orthodoxies feel too entrenched to uproot; there are always many parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But it is human beings collectively, not a small number of elites working in secret who can decide what kind of world we want to live in.
Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistleblowing, of activism, of political journalism. And that’s what is happe-ning now, thanks to the revelations brought about by Edward Snowden.14
Between the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, in the so-called me-dia art scene, the debate about the collectivisation of meme-dia tactics was central.
Today, the challenge is to imagine a distributed range of practices able to bring back a shared perception of power, which should not only rely on the traditional mass media system, but also reflect on strategies of collective actions and inter-ventions—providing solutions, which are political and not merely technological.