A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Thursday, July 31, 2014
The World of Whistleblowing: Needles in Haystacks, Intelligence Gathering, Subjects and Citizens
By Binoy Kampmark-July 30, 2014
Both Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack are familiar names in the
world of whistleblowing. They are currently visiting Australia, giving
talks and presentations on the subject of how estranged subjects of the
state can reclaim their citizenry. In a neat, taut presentation by both
speakers at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on Tuesday, both outlined
the seminal points of the whistleblowing mandate and the consequences of
not being one. (We know all too well the consequences that face those
who do take that pathway of conversion.)
Drake is one of the few in the growing collective of whistleblowers that
has a direct line of inspiration for former intelligence contractor
Edward Snowden, having himself worked as a senior executive of the
National Security Agency. Radack represented Drake in the legal
proceedings against him, and was herself a whistleblower in disclosing
FBI misconduct in the interrogation of John Walker Lindh, known more
popularly as the “American Taliban”. Snowden has also retained Radack
as one of his legal representatives.
The language of subjects reclaiming citizenry may seem alien to those of
the digital age, where information as concept and presence is
ubiquitous. Human beings are units of cumulative data, even as they
vote, purchase, and fornicate. Both activists are waging a war against
apathy – the disabling apathy that assumes that the totally accessible
being, one whose information is readily available for perusal by the
powerful, and the secret fraternity, is a worthy idea.
The police state set piece will always be the same in this regard: if
you have done nothing contrary to the laws, there will be no retribution
or punishment. This logic, by extension, applies to concealing the
abuses of that every state. Only the state breaks laws, and remedies
them. Citizens (now rendered docile subjects in the digital age) are
required to heel.
Drake did come across as gloomy, and he has every reason to. He was
hounded, threatened and faced the prospect of having the key thrown away
for decades for mishandling documents under the Espionage Act. In June
2011, the 10 original charges filed against him were dropped, leaving
the way for a plea for misusing a computer. He now works in an Apple
store in Maryland, having had his security access revoked, and the
circle of friends within the intelligence community withdrawn. Mixing
with Drake is dangerous business if you want to get far on the
retirement plan and keep sighing at the picket fence. This is the
“radioactive” dilemma – one which the hardened whistleblower faces.
Expose, and the world withdraws.
Drake demonstrated the all too problematic of paradoxes in modern
intelligence gathering: that efficiency does not lie in massive, bulk
collection alone. It lies, rather, in the aptitudes of selection,
discrimination and proportion. The move from the analogue world to a
digital one has made the gatherers of data lazy, the modern equivalent
of gouty, slothful aristocrats.
Both Radack and Drake played much on the metaphor of the haystack and
needles. The haystack is simply been filled with more hay, enlarged by
the scope of inquiry being pursued by the likes of NSA and GCHQ. The
result is that either the needle vanishes, or everything becomes a
needle. Perspective here is obliterated.
The whistleblower in national security offers the best corrective to the
abusive reach of power, providing the means to return citizenry to
individuals who are mere subjects of data and collection. The dangers
apparent in the very idea of information collection lie in the precise
lack of relationship between agency and citizen. You are not a citizen
before the collection demons, but a mere subject of analysis. There is
no contractual relationship, either socially or politically, between the
NSA operator and the subject he or she examines. The electoral link
between representative and citizen is thereby circumvented.
The obsession with controlling every facet of information, data
collection, and retention, as a means of protecting a state’s security,
has become pathological. This is the message from Drake and Radack.
Such pathologies tend to prove grossly inefficient in the main, and very
dangerous when left to unguided frolics.
The distance between the scribbles of the Constitution, and the exercise
of rights, is becoming wider in the United States. It is even wider in
countries, such as Australia, where the very idea of a bill of rights is
treated with apoplectic aversion by those who believe that the wisdom
of the common law will prevail. Currently, the Australian Attorney
General, George Brandis, is busying himself with finding new offences in
terms of punishing public disclosure, and protecting the domestic and
external intelligence services from the reaches of the law. Freedom is
fine, as long as it is exercised by the right sort.
While President Harry Truman ushered in the national security state in
titanic confrontations, actual and imaginary, with communism, the post
9/11 world ushered in an intelligence hobgoblin beyond the rule of law.
Attempts to claw back that relationship between data and the citizen is
one of the most important projects of our time. An intelligence
community operating within the tight embrace of the law is not only one
that is safer, but one that is invariably more efficient in what it
does. The perception of where the needle lies, and what it is, needs to
change.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College,
Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com