The voluminous pages of classified information that were
leaked by Edward Snowden, an erstwhile NSA contractor, revealed the elaborate,
systematic and ongoing snooping by the NSA into every phone call, email and internet action by ordinary citizens in the
US and in other countries. The volume of
data and the type of data that is being collected by the NSA is
staggering. NSA can, through its archives,
and if it so wants, piece together every action, thought or conversation that
ordinary people have every day in the conduct of their personal lives, their
professions or their hobbies. It is
indeed Orwell’s Big Brother fully deployed with the assistance of modern day
technology. And just as in Orwell’s
novel, it is all being done in the name of national security and the desire to
protect us from each other.
While there is discourse and debate among civil libertarians
about what all this snooping means with regards to individual liberty that is
at the essence of the US constitution, there seems to be an overall apathy to
the Government intrusion amongst the public.
After a series of national traumas starting with 9/11, and then the
prolonged wars , the many foiled terrorist activities in the homeland and the
Boston Marathon bombings, the country is in a mood to give up certain liberties
for buying some piece of mind with the knowledge that the Government is
watching and ahead of the curve on what the bad guys amongst us are up to. A case can be made that if the Government was
able to get to the doings of the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, the Boston
Marathon bombings could have been avoided.
But what would we be trading for giving up our privacy and
through that our freedom to have uninhibited thoughts? What corrosive long term consequences will
that have on the nation’s standing as the bastion of individual liberty and the
guarantor of freedom to pursue happiness of their definition by its
citizens? And consequently, what will
that mean for our economic security in an evolving interconnected world?
The world we live in is changing at a rapid pace. The pace and the dramatic nature of the
changes are being ushered in because of the technology changes. And the United States is at the heart of many
of the evolving technologies – the discovery of the science needed to make the
technologies, the innovative application of these discoveries to come up with
new inventions, and the re-arranging of ways of living by incorporating these
new technologies into our daily lives.
The US is economically benefiting significantly because of
this leadership position that it holds today.
But other countries are catching up and are trying to participate in the
innovation game and being the first ones to come up with new ideas and
products. The world of tomorrow will be
a hugely interconnected world of commerce and the countries are going to become
like corporations – those that continually innovate are going to hold positions
of power, influence and hegemony. The
US is a leader today because the best talent in the world wants to come to its
shores to use their mind and brains to create the new discoveries and
innovations of tomorrow. A large part of
that attraction is because of the openness of the society that we have created
and the guaranty of freedom to pursue ideas that are outside the
mainstream. We may not be an attractive society
if we start telegraphing to the world that there is interference to that
freedom of thought. And soon, we may not
have the edge in the cycle of innovation.
We cannot live in a world anymore where we are cocooned off
from the rest of the world. Our security
cannot be defined anymore just as the security of the geographic
boundaries. The shrinking of the world
through internet and travel has inextricably interconnected the world and the
economic security of our nation goes beyond the national borders. Any policy that talks about security has to
look at beyond the borders and the implications of our standing in the context
of the whole world.
We may be able to block the terrorists entering the nation
or perpetrating cowardly acts in our homeland by resorting to overwhelming
snooping of all activities. But during
that process, we may also stop the inflow of superior brains from all over the
world into our country and over a period of time give up our perch as the economic
leader of the world.
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