This morning’s Observer column on apparent public indifference to pervasive Internet surveillance.

What’s even more alarming is that the one group of professionals who really ought to be alert to the danger are journalists. After all, these are the people who define news as “something that someone powerful does not want published”, who pride themselves on “holding government to account” or sometimes, when they’ve had a few drinks, on “speaking truth to power”. And yet, in their reactions to the rolling scoops published by the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, many of them seem to have succumbed either to a weird kind of spiteful envy, or to a desire to act as the unpaid stenographers to the security services and their political masters.

We’ve seen this before, of course, notably in the visceral hatred directed towards WikiLeaks by the mainstream media in both this country and the US. As I read the vitriol being heaped on Julian Assange, I wondered how the press would have reacted if Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning had handed his CD downloads to the editor of the Des Moines Register who had then published them. Would that editor have been lauded as a champion of freedom, or vilified as a traitor warranting summary assassination?

Last week in the US, we saw a welcome sign that some people in journalism have woken up to the existential threat posed by the NSA to their profession – and, by implication, to political freedom…

Full text.

Great stuff from Andrew Sullivan.

What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history, and reiterated as a theater of comfort and nostalgia. They want their presidents white and their budget balanced now. That balancing it now would tip the whole world into a second depression sounds like elite cant to them; that America is, as a matter of fact, a coffee-colored country – and stronger for it – does not remove their desire for it not to be so; indeed it intensifies their futile effort to stop immigration reform. And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.

This is a religion – but a particularly modern, extreme and unthinking fundamentalist religion. And such a form of religion is the antithesis of the mainline Protestantism that once dominated the Republican party as well, to a lesser extent, the Democratic party.

It also brooks no distinction between religion and politics, seeing them as fused in the same cultural and religious battle. Much of the GOP hails from that new purist, apocalyptic sect right now – and certainly no one else is attacking that kind of religious organization. But it will do to institutional political parties what entrepreneurial fundamentalism does to mainline churches: its appeal to absolute truth, total rectitude and simplicity of worldview instantly trumps tradition, reason, moderation, compromise.

And this:

I believe that you cannot understand the current GOP without also grasping how bewildered so many people are by the dizzying onset of modernity. The 21st Century has brought Islamist war to America, the worst recession since the 1930s, a debt-ridden federal government, a majority-minority future, gay marriage, universal healthcare and legal weed. If you were still seething from the eruption of the 1960s, and thought that Reagan had ended all that, then the resilience of a pluralistic, multi-racial, fast-miscegenating, post-gay America, whose president looks like the future, not the past, you would indeed, at this point, be in a world-class, meshugganah, cultural panic.

When you add in the fact that the American dream stopped working for most working-class folks at some point in the mid 1970s, and when you see the national debt soaring from the Reagan years onward, made much worse by the Bush-Cheney years, and then exploded by the recession Bush bequeathed, you have a combustible mixture. It’s very easy to lump all this together into a paranoid fantasy of an American apocalypse that must somehow be stopped at all cost. In trying to understand the far-right mindset – which accounts for around a quarter of the country – I think you have to zoom out and see all of this in context.

Well, well. Are we surprised by this latest Snowden revelation (published by the Washington Post)?

Is the pope a Protestant?

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.

Whenever the mainstream media starts to portray someone as a “loser”, then you know you’re on to something. I felt that from the beginning about Edward Snowden, especially in the early days as the cod-psychoanalysis and general character-assassination burgeoned in the right-wing media. My impression of Snowden is exactly the opposite of the picture of him that emerged from these travesties. He looked to me from the outset like a very smart, thoughtful and sophisticated thinker. And the more we see of his revelations, the stronger this impression becomes. Here is someone who used his privileged access carefully, not just downloading at will but picking out aspects of the NSA’s (and, to some extent, GCHQ’s) behaviour that illuminated the things that are alarming and questionable about their activities: the sheer scale; the ambition; the arrogance; the confidence that they are, effectively, beyond the control of the politicians who nominally ‘oversee’ them — and the implications of all this for democracy. This maturity and confidence were on display last week when he appeared in a video after being awarded the Sam Adams prize for integrity in intelligence. “We don’t have an oversight problem”, he says at one point. “We have an undersight problem”. Elegantly put.

Julian Assange is a different kettle of fish. His personal idiosyncrasies have had the effect of turning him into an easily-disregarded nutter. Whereas Snowden seems to have none of Assange’s swaggering egotism, the WikiLeaks founder possesses an unerring knack for alienating those who wish to support him, or even those who wish him well. “Assange is simply too weird, in his person and his politics”, writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells in a thoughtful piece,

to have become part of any mainstream coalition—but they have collapsed so completely that there is little left of Assange’s public image right now beyond the crude cartoon. Vain and self-mythologizing, he has been accused of sexual assault by two of his supporters; a prophet of the mounting powers of the surveillance state, he now reportedly lives in a fifteen-by-thirteen-foot room in London’s Ecuadoran Embassy, sleeping in a women’s bathroom, monitored by intelligence agencies at all times; still trusting of the volunteers around him, he gave one such man access to secret American diplomatic cables about Belarus, only to find that information passed along to the Belarusian dictator. It is as if Assange has been consumed by his own weaknesses and obsessions. Calling around, I’d heard that the last prominent London intellectual who still supported him was the writer Tariq Ali, but when I finally reached him, via Skype, on an island in the Adriatic, it turned out that Ali, too, had grown exasperated with Assange.

And yet he remains an important person in our world, because of what he has achieved. The nice thing about Wallace-Wells’s article is that it dives through all the obfuscatory controversy to get at the significance of the man. “It is strange”, writes Wallace-Wells, “how completely these dramas have obscured the power of his insights and how fully we now seem to be living in Julian Assange’s world”. He goes on:

The insight that Assange husbanded and Snowden’s evidence confirmed is that the sheer seduction of this trove—the possibility of secretly knowing everything about other people—would lead governments and companies to abandon their own laws and ethics. This is the paranoid worldview of a hacker, assembled from a lifetime of chasing information. But Assange proved that it was accurate, and the consequence of his discovery has been a strange political moment, when to see the world through the lens of conspiracies has not only made you paranoid. It’s also made you aware.

Assange’s detractors often call him a conspiracy theorist and mean it as a simple slur. But in the most literal sense, Assange is exactly that: a theorist of conspiracies. He gave his major pre-WikiLeaks manifesto the title Conspiracy As Governance, and in it he argued that authoritarian institutions relied on the people working within them conspiring to protect potentially damaging information. In large institutions like militaries or banks, to keep these kinds of secrets requires an enormous number of collaborators. If you could find a way to guarantee anonymity, then even the most peripheral people within these institutions could leak its secrets and break the conspiracy. WikiLeaks was built to receive these leaks. Bradley Manning, in other words, did not simply find WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was designed for Bradley Manning.

Wallace-Wells goes on (as I did) to pick up on Peter Ludlow’s essay about the disjunction between personal morality and the ethical dilemmas that being a conscientious member of an organisation can pose for its individual members. “Conspiracy doesn’t have to mean old white dudes at a mahogany table,” Ludlow wrote. “It can be an emergent property of a network of good individuals, where all of a sudden you’ve got a harm-causing macro entity.”

The response of the security and governmental establishment to both Assange and Snowden has been to try and character-assassinate the messenger. With a target like Assange, they didn’t really have their work cut out. But Snowden is different. Which is why it behoves the rest of us to focus not on the messenger, but on the message.

LATER: Jon Crowcroft points out that there is an important difference between Snowden and Assange, namely that Snowden is a whistleblower whereas Assange is an enabler/publisher of the outputs of whistleblowers. The real hero of the War Logs and Cablegate story is, of course, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning.

Good piece by Nick Davies on the Stockholm Syndrome that enslaves our politicians to the spooks whom they nominally control.

Ignore for a moment the vexing sight of journalists denouncing their own worth. Set aside too the question of why rival newspapers might want to attack the Guardian’s exclusives. Follow the argument. Who should make the judgment?

The official answer is that we should trust the security agencies themselves. Over the past 35 years, I’ve worked with a clutch of whistleblowers from those agencies, and they’ve all shared one underlying theme – that behind the screen of official secrecy, they had seen rules being bent and/or broken in a way which precisely suggested that the agencies should not be trusted. Cathy Massiter and Robin Robison, for example, described respectively MI5 and GCHQ pursuing politically motivated projects to spy on peace activists and trade unionists. Peter Wright told of MI5 illegally burgling its way across London “while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way”. David Shayler exposed a plot both lawless and reckless by MI5 and MI6 to recruit al-Qaida supporters to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi.

All of this was known to their bosses. None of it should have been happening. But the agencies in whom we are invited to place our trust not only concealed it but without exception then attacked the whistleblowers who revealed it.

Would we do better to trust the politicians who have oversight of the agencies? It’s instructive to look back from our vantage point, post-Snowden, to consider what was happening only two years ago when the government attempted to introduce new legislation which came to be known as the snooper’s charter. If the oversight politicians are as well-informed as they claim, they must have known that this was in part a cynical attempt to create retrospective legal cover for surveillance tools that were already secretly being used, but they said nothing. And when parliament refused to pass that law, clearly indicating that there was no democratic mandate for those tools, they still stayed silent…

Seb Schmoller (whom God Preserve) drew my attention to a fascinating essay in the New York Times in which the philosopher Peter Ludlow makes an insightful link between Establishment hysteria over Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing and the furore generated by Hannah Arendt’s reporting of the Eichmann trial in 1961 (currently being highlighted in the feature film about Arendt which is in cinemas as I write).

Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called “the banality of evil.” One interpretation of this holds that it was not an observation about what a regular guy Adolf Eichmann seemed to be, but rather a statement about what happens when people play their “proper” roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.

In his essay, Ludlow draws on Robert Jackall’s analysis (in his book Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, a study of how membership of an organisation makes people adopt different moral codes from those they might hold as individuals. Jackall is a sociologist and his book is a study of the ethics of decision-making in corporations. Mostly, he argues, corporate employees are not evil people, but in their organisational roles they tend to follow five rules:

(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.

This was the code by which operatives like Ed Snowden (or Bradley Manning) were expected to live. In the end, the tension between obeying the codes and the imperatives of their consciences caused them to break ranks. The moral courage implicit in this seems admirable to many of us, but it’s also what infuriates those who regard them as traitors or worse. (Which includes most of the mass media btw, to their eternal shame.)

“Who do these people think they are, to put themselves in the position of passing moral judgement on matters that are way above their pay grades?” is the general tenor of the spluttering rage directed at Snowden and Manning. But the people who hold such views are generally the folks who either run or have risen in the organisations on which the whistleblowers blew the whistle. They are people, in other words, who signed up to Jackall’s Five Rules and checked their consciences in at the door when they signed on. Whenever I hear them ranting on about “betrayal” or “treason” I am reminded of Bertrand’s G.K. Chesterton’s* observation that the slogan “My Country Right or Wrong” is as daft as “My Mother, Drunk or Sober”.

* Thanks to Roger Whittaker for correction.