The Inevitable Privacy / Government Posts, Part III

(this is the third installment of a series, which starts here)

It's Time We Had A Little Talk...

In various ways, and by various interpretations, it's fairly easy to argue that almost all of the players involved in this creeping, pervasive digital Peeping-Tom-ism acted with some of the best of motivations, such as a desire to preserve the country seen as being under threat, and the desperate need to modernize counterintelligence after a small group's attack revealed it's creaky and outmoded ineffectiveness.

Of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

There are those who will downplay the significance of the recent leaks by Edward Snowden, either because they consider the journalism itself second-rate, or because they are as unsurprised as I am in these revelations, and assume that any good citizen would already be aware of this. This isn't really central to this series, so I'll leave it for another day, except to say that Snowden's disclosures are important not because this is really shocking, but because it stirs the pot.  The discussion allows for opinions like those linked above to enter the discussion, and perhaps have a chance to be mentioned and considered with at least as much depth as King of Thrones or entertainment awards shows.  The true eye-opener is not that we were unaware, but that - like children under your roof or that cute little baby alligator - this this has grown imperceptibly over time, and is now a lot bigger than you once thought possible.

And this is important, because it's not a singular realization.  The fact of the matter is that, over time, we have lost what really matters:  We have lost the conscience of our nation.

Americans love the story of the lone underdog, who speaks truth to power, reveals corruption and abuse of the public trust, and saves the day for Joe and Jane American. And, from time to time, we'd had those underdogs, and had come to expect a sort of institutional humility,  even when insincere.  We want to believe that our government is accountable to the people.  That our national does not sit here, lounging across the North American continent merely to consume a steady stream of piña coladas and dance music, while a small number of folks wield extraordinary power contrary to every principle of ethics and democracy we think we know.  Sure - there would be a small number of folks with extraordinary power - that's a given:  But they were to be folks known to us, chosen by us, and accountable to us.  This recourse to firings - to protests - to the demand to be treated as meaningful participants in our own government - has been the source of that institutional humility.  It's been what we imagine as the happy ending to the cinematic drama of American life.

Oops.

Instead, we are seeing accountability go away - from individuals and institutions: As our agencies implement policies that create very intimate bedfellows of corporate and public governance, it no longer becomes an option to let the rabble poke about with sensitive policy matters.  Like security in our national defense, the additional prong of security in our livelihoods became a ticket to negating accountability.  Principles must yield, "we must think practically about this," or people might get hurt, killed, or even *gasp* poor.

Nice house you've got there.  Be a shame if anything were to *ahem* happen to it.

Protest as Primal Scream Therapy

The Occupy movements were a reaction to a feeling.  Despite the attempts of some professional protesters to the contrary, the sound of all those people on the streets was not a cry for a definitive solution, but a basic yell of pain.  Not just economic pain, but a far more fundamental and telling pain:  It was the loss of our collective conscience's ability to be heard.   For the first time, it began to become very clear that it made little difference who was elected to office at the national level: On the minor issues, the differences were those of cold and structured paternalistic craziness versus warm and structured maternalistic craziness; of mad idiots who believed that they were anointed by God to lead the world versus mad idiots who believed that they were anointed by Gaea to let the world lead itself.  On the large issues:  issues of accountability, issues of personal respect, privacy, and autonomy?  The Who told us already.  Yet we permitted ourselves to be fooled again and again.  Voices were raised in the realization that we no longer had a voice.

But even those voices were silenced.  Within the course of a week, I was on the streets of New York first as a protester waving an American flag, and then as a businessman in a suit.  I saw Bloomberg's use of crowd suppression, infiltration, and dispersal tactics utilized to amazing effect:  A protest of what I would guess was tens of thousands of people was slap-chopped into little pieces and made to look like a couple of thousand.  Media interviews were always with the "fringe" types.  Meanwhile, Wall Street truly lived in fear: Twenty-foot "security zones" outside building doors.  Dogs.  Three forms of ID to get in to a meeting, and one of them had better be a tie.

In elections, even those thought (or claiming) to be "different" and "independent" weren't.  The system was well-established.  Anyone who spends a day talking to staffers and visiting Congressional offices knows this.  As citizens, we are pretty much the pesky three-year-old in the room: "The grown-ups have to talk now, sweetie, maybe you can go out with your friends and see who sings the prettiest or something?"

"How can politicians represent you when they are paid $millions to represent others?"

It would take something radical to change the character of government in the U.S.

Coming up in the final installment of this series:  A Modest Proposal

The Ends ARE The Means

In June, 2011, while he was under house arrest in the UK, Julian Assange (founder of WikiLeaks) had some visitors and chatted about a bunch of interesting stuff.  A full recording and transcript are available. His guests included Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, and Lisa Shields, VP of the Council on Foreign Relations (and allegedly consort of Schmidt a that time).

One part I found rather interesting was Assange's reaction when asked about "winning" the war he seemed to have started against the major powers in the world, and against the concept that authorities are best suited to determine what information is suitable for release to the public.  Here's the relevant portion of the transcript:

LS (Lisa Shields): How do you know if you've won?
JA (Jilian Assange): I've won?
JC (Jared Cohen): Lisa asked the best question of the day.
ES (Eric Schmidt): How do you know if you've won?
JA: Well it's not possible to win this kind of thing. This is a continuous striving that people have done for a long time. Of course, there is many individual battles that we win, but it is the nature of human beings that human beings lie and cheat and deceive and organized groups of people who do not lie and cheat and deceive find each other and get together... and because they have that temperament, are more efficient. Because they are not lying and cheating and deceiving each other. And that is an old, a very old struggle between opportunists and collaborators. And so I don't see that going away. I think we can make some significant advances and it is perhaps, it is the making of these advances and being involved in that struggle that is good for people. So the process is in part the end game. It's not just to get somewhere in the end, rather this process of people feeling that it is worthwhile to be involved in that sort of struggle, is in fact worthwhile for people.

Two themes resonate: The concept that "playing fair" has been, and still is, a superior strategy in terms of achieving goals; and the concept that the Ends ARE the Means.

I find both of these consistently reinforced in my work with leaders and leadership training, and wonder why they aren't more universally recognized and practiced.