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Todd Essig Contributor


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Why The Edward Snowden Story Is Such A Psychologically Compelling Mess

A parametric plot of a Möbius strip

A parametric plot of a Möbius strip (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Edward Snowden story is not going away any time soon, and not just because he remains a stateless soul lost in terminal limbo. What makes the Snowden story so culturally sticky are the enduring complications and conflicts that come from mixing a big data mindset with privacy rights. Plus, by tossing in government power, national security, and anti-terrorism one gets a psychologically compelling mess: Is he a whistle-blowing hero or an arrogant traitor? Has he become a political refugee or is he a criminal on the run? Was he protecting our rights or putting our lives at risk?

And the answer is, well, there’s no way to know, no way to decide. Sure, one can posture; line up politically; give voice to the familiar. But to really decide requires thinking clearly about privacy in our still emerging age of big data, and that is currently impossible; we lack the conceptual tools and the situation itself is still developing (for a good intro see Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. The best one can do is notice the mess, feel the conflicts, and try to learn from the inconsistencies found.

Consider those who see the still stateless Snowden as whistleblower, now estimated to be about 60% in a fluid, changing measure of public opinion. The number includes both parties, people on both the right and the left. Clearly, some of the 60% can be accounted for by those who are just reflexively anti-Obama or anti-government. They always find a conspiracy or police state. But they’re not interesting because they’re not even trying to think about the issues. They’re just using them to vent the same tired nonsense.

More interesting are those with thoughtful, conflicted, and inconsistent responses. I have in mind all the people who routinely feed social media’s insatiable appetite for data with vast quantities of privacy-destroying personal information and, at the same time, feel Snowden is a whistle-blowing hero. These are people who blithely trust Google or Facebook to treat their personal data with respect, or rely on the government to put privacy protections in place, but are sharply critical when the government uses a similar big data mindset.

In the big data mindset, lots and lots (and lots and lots!) of sloppy information is a goldmine. Whether in the now famous story of Target using buying patterns to learn a teen was pregnant before her father learned of that fact or the government using phone call and email meta-data to foil terrorist plots, big data works. It just needs to be mined for the gold it contains. Of course, that gold is in the form of complex, hidden mathematical interdependencies discernible only by those with the skills and motivation to look.

And look they do, whether in the service of private profit or collective security. Without fully realizing it, participating in modern life means one now stands naked in front of those with access to big data’s x-ray vision glasses. Unfortunately, our psychology has not kept pace with this change. We have analog body-based feelings about privacy ill-suited to the datafied world of big data.

A potentially toxic tango of power and privacy starts very early: Whose body is it? Who gets to wash it and feed it? Who gets to clothe it, or look at it without clothes? Attuned parents are graceful-enough dancers to make the tango work, even when occasionally someone steps on a toe. The result is a growing child secure in his or her relationships, a child with a solid-enough sense of self and of self in relation to others. Those developing kids know where they stop and other people start. They are able to experience their desires, feelings, and thoughts as their own, and as being centered in their own body. Of course everyone is different in this regard with different styles and personal boundaries, but thankfully most adults end up knowing the feeling of what’s ours, what’s yours, and what’s mine.

The big data mindset takes all those hard-fought developmental achievements and turns them into a Möbius strip with no beginning and no end, no inside and no outside. When the data is big enough and the miner clever enough, all those things I thought were mine (like my relationships, desires, feelings, and thoughts) become ours, and sometimes even yours because big data can predict things about individuals that even individuals do not know. No one has come up with a way to wrap our heads around the fact that unspecified data mining experts can know us in ways we do not.

Click-by-click we’ve stripped ourselves bare for access to a free widget, the convenience of an online purchase, the ease of a credit card, or 10% off at the big-box. It’s just the way it is we say, way of the world. Thread by thread we take off all our clothes and get into a tub filled by companies that care nothing about us other than how much we consume. And we shrug because gmail is so damn convenient: ok, no worries, let’s make the bath as much fun as we can.

But as the Snowden story reveals, sometimes it’s not ok. In some situations with some entities we want the privacy we fought for in childhood. It’s ok when Mom gives the bath, just not Dad, or vice-versa. And for many today it’s ok when Google or Facebook discerns the contours of private selves in the data they collect, but that outline should not be seen by the government.

So, if you ever come to a comfortable conclusion about big data and privacy, if you don’t feel conflicted, then you are probably missing the point somehow. Adult privacy in the age of big data has been severed from the children we were, and that is neither ok nor not ok. It just is.

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  • This isn’t a privacy issue about for-profit firms mining data and perhaps passing that data along to federal law enforcement agencies, war agencies and spy agencies. To even suggest such either is to be a shill for the political establishment or profoundly stupid.

    This is a constitutional issue.

    Article 3, Section 1, authorizes the entity of the collective states’ legislatures in union when they established their federation as their unified representative for foreign affairs and as their internal dispute mechanism to stop firms of any two states from colluding against any firm of a third state, the true meaning of making commerce regular, to establish one supreme Court. The Constitution writers did not name it “the Supreme Court”. Merely, the Constitution authorizes one court above all others as well as inferior courts, which can exist from time to time.

    The Constitution does not authorize Congress to establish a second superior Court. Yet, that is what Congress has done by establishing secret courts. A secret court is even superior to the now-named, but wrongly named Supreme Court.

    As well, there is no legal basis for the NSA to spy on Americans. No agency of the U.S. government, the federation representative of the states’ government, has legal basis to spy on any Americans, any time. The Fourth Amendment is quite clear on how searches of citizens. Searches must be specific and exact and publicly notified.

    Now, if Americans want all-time spying by the NSA and if Americans wanted a plethora of courts above the “Supreme” Court, Americans have a means to get that accomplished. It’s called the amending the Constitution.

    As a people, why do we have a written constitution that is supposedly the supreme law of the land, a constitution designed to establish a federation of independent countries, which we call states?

    Never was the Constitution written and agreed upon to create a national government. If that were so, why do states as countries exist? Why not dispense with states as countries altogether? It would be much easier to for the politicians of a national government to impose their wills on people using the counties as the administrative units, riding the people of their states’ legislatures and counties’ legislatures.

  • Todd Essig Todd Essig, Contributor 1 year ago

    I’m either a shill or stupid? Not a good way to have a conversation. In addition to being gratuitously insulting, your post is an excellent example of the uninteresting response I wrote about in the third paragraph:


    This issue at hand is privacy. Do you have anything to say about that?

  • The issue is not about privacy as I have tried to point out below. If it were just about privacy we would be as worried about google gathering their meta data. No it is about the abuse of power when government is allowed to spy on its own citizens. It is an absolute refutation of a government of the people by the people and for the people. It is unacceptable in America.

  • Jeff Ku Jeff Ku 1 year ago

    In my humble opinion it’s high time for someone to raise the question about Snowden’s credibility and motives, raising the possibility he is not who they want us to believe he is:

  • It is far different to be monitored by a corporation whose motive for doing so is to sell you more products. Ultimately I can choose not to buy. I can boycott that company. But government has shown itself throughout history to use information in much more sinister ways, and against its own people. The Stasi of East Germany were perhaps the worst example of Big Brother and how horrific and debasing a police state and surveillance state can be. In the US we can point to the dirty tricks of Watergate, the abuses of Jay Edgar Hoover. A government in power can start collecting databases of who is with them on issues and who is against them. Opponents can then be targeted for their beliefs. And it can all be done in secrecy, with you having no access to your own file. Careers of leaders of opposition can be ruined through blackmail or false information campaigns. Their friends can be pressured to be informants. Americans are very naive about this stuff but ask Europeans that have lived through the Nazi era and the cold war in Eastern Europe. The reason for the 4th Amendment is not all about privacy to avoid being immodest. It is about preventing the abuses of power. That was the purpose when it was written, and it is the essential purpose now. So this article, where it conflates corporate and government snooping is likewise naive and off point.

  • Todd Essig Todd Essig, Contributor 1 year ago

    You accurately point to some egregious recent examples of government abuse. But government also uses its power to keep us safe; power is not always used abusively. Seeing it only one way rather than in terms of both dangers and benefits is a red flag of avoiding the complexities and conflicts of embodied privacy. The Snowden story is not as simple as your post suggests with clearly defined good guys and bad guys.

  • health108 health108 1 year ago

    Let’s be more accurate here. Our foreign policy has been consistently creating terrorists for 20 years now. As a result of our endless war on terrorism, our nation is more feared than respected. There are bad guys everywhere but we have become the biggest of all.

  • Sure the government should seek to protect the people. But that is not the only mandate — to be our daddy. The government can only act to protect us in accordance with the constitution or otherwise by the consent of the governed. The government can never override the constitution to protect the public. And that is very important because what is considered “safety” is not an absolute but subject to argument that only democracy can provide. And there are other things more important to most of us than safety. I think we once had a statesman that said Give me Liberty or Give me Death.

  • I agree…. how does one stop it … say 5 or 10 myears from now? How do our children say…”enough”?
    by then everyone will be traceable, and no one will be able to dissent.
    The gov will be able to squash anyone who doesnt go along sheepishly.

  • health108 health108 1 year ago

    Snowden said his only fear was that the nation would forget what he revealed. It looks like that’s already happening.  This article ignores or misses the fact the NSA is operating illegally and has been for years.

    Read and learn.

    Russ Tice worked as an offensive National Security Agency (NSA) agent from 2002 to 2005, before becoming a source for this Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times article exposing NSA domestic spying.

    Last month Tice spoke out saying that he held NSA wiretap orders targeting numerous members of the U.S. government, including one for a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.



    That sounds like a lot of abuse of the rules that govern NSA domestic spying.

    “The abuse is rampant and everyone is pretending that it’s never happened, and it couldn’t happen. … I know [there was abuse] because I had my hands on the papers for these sorts of things: They went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of congress — Senate and the House — especially on the intelligence committees and the armed services committees, lawyers, law firms, judges, State Department officials, part of the White House, multinational companies, financial firms, NGOs, civil rights groups …”

    Tice told Sibel Edmonds’ radio show that back in 2005 the NSA didn’t have the processing power, infrastructure, and storage to collect everything, but a source inside the NSA recently confirmed to him that increased capabilities allow the spy agency to copy “every domestic communication in this country, word for word, content, every phone conversation, every email — they are collecting everything in bulk and putting it in databases…Outrageous abuses have happened, and it’s all being kept hush hush.”

    Here’s another article to give you some perspective.

  • Todd Essig Todd Essig, Contributor 1 year ago

    Not being a lawyer or legal scholar I can’t speak to the legality of what the NSA is doing. But given laws I don’t really understand I do know that the possibility for both abuse and increased safety exist. And keeping both sides in mind is made even more difficult by the profound emotional complexity of privacy issues in the age of big data. I think we need to do better than take sides and shout at each other.

  • What I object to in your argumentation is that you make it sound like technology makes our constitution somehow outdated and meaningless. But that is simply not true in this case. Sure technology amplifies the volumes that can be gathered. But wire tapping is wiretapping. Search is search and seizure is seizure. You make it sound like our constitution has become obsolete and vague, and psychological on this matter and that is just not true. Stop pretending you cannnot read our constitution — that its too complicated for anybody but lawyers. It was not written for lawyers. It is the people’s mandate to the government in order to consent to be governed and all of our public servants must swear to uphold it.

  • i didnt hear anyone shouting…they were mearly exchanges of ideas.
    But maybe you can tell us why we cant read even one sentence of the released (and already published doc).
    if the US citizens cant read them when the rest of the world can….how can we make informed decisions?
    TELL US for crying out loud!

  • Todd Essig Todd Essig, Contributor 1 year ago

    Not outdated and meaningless at all. But emerging technologies (like big data) do create historically unique challenges that cannot be answered with the same tired bromides. It is simply false to say that search is search and seizure is seizure. We have to embrace today’s complexities not pretend everything is the same as it ever was.

  • Todd, it’s so easy to slide into giving up privacy one iota at a time. I remember about 8 years ago, I refused to get an EZPass for myself because I didn’t want anyone tracking where I went. But then, a bought one for an entrepreneur friend who was having difficulty paying tolls to get to business meetings… and when it came back to me later, it was just easier to keep and use it.

    And then the store discount cards started going crazy… I’ve been resisting them but after you get one or two to get a discount, you realize that you’re actually paying a premium by way of higher prices for your privacy if you DON’T have one. So now I have a separate wallet just for all the dang cards. How did this happen?

    Carol Gyzander

  • Todd Essig Todd Essig, Contributor 1 year ago

    Thanks Carol. Not participating in the world as it is, complete with useful RFIDs and discount cards, is I think pretty much impossible.

  • Jose Jose 1 year ago

    I know where I stand on the issue of the NSA collecting metadata on our phone calls and our internet activities: I think it is a clear violation of the fourth amendment and is clear overreaching by the government. I believe the privacy vs security dichotomy is false, as I think we can have both privacy and security without having to forgo of one for the other.

    I think that when it comes to our civil liberties, we should not make any concessions. Our civil liberties should be safeguarded so as no future rogue politicians can wield their power perversely against the people.

    I also think that secret courts and secret laws have no place in a democracy. I think there should be more government transparency. After all, we the people are the private sector, and the government the public sector, which means that we should know what our government is doing and not the other way around.

    I believe as Benjamin Franklin that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

    I really do hope that the light shed by Snowden on the NSA broad sweeping of our metadata brings about some change. I am hopeful despite the seemingly unilateral defense by the media of the NSA surveillance program and the lack of coverage on television news networks that instead are diverting attention to the Trayvon Martin case.

  • Todd Essig Todd Essig, Contributor 1 year ago

    We’ll just have to disagree. I think you’re purchasing certainty at the price of complexity. Yours is, I believe, a comfortable but ultimately more dangerous position.

  • how can US citizens make informed decisions about all of this when the gov wont let us read the released docs?
    Why doesnt a publication or other news outlet TELL us that we cant read those docs?
    Why cant we trust even the FREE PRESS?
    Tell us…….
    then we can discuss the other issues…..but we NEED info….

  • Robert Chase Robert Chase 1 year ago

    Mr. Essig, the import of this affair far transcends psychology; it turns on fundamental issues about the nature of the United States of America, our Constitution, and our future. What Edward Snowden has revealed demonstrates that those leading this country are not fit even to be citizens of it, and insofar as they are waging war against the Constitution, are not fit to live. Edward Snowden is properly termed a patriot. Patriots who are also heroes may undertake acts of resistance against the treasonous conspiracy now controlling all three branches of our government of which the majority of fascists and fascist dupes who now populate our country cannot conceive. The supposed “land of the free” is now the least free nation on Earth in terms of the proportion of the population living free of a cell, and both the Fascist Party and the Collaborationist Party are responsible. Anyone who counts themselves an American who is still a member of one of these criminal political organizations needs to disassociate themselves from them immediately. The situation is beyond the talking stage.

  • turin turin 1 year ago

    It’s not just individuals who stand naked but governments as well now, which sucks if you’re a lying overlord like Obama. Not switching planes to get a 29-year-old hacker!? Tell that to President Morales! And that’s just one of MANY, MANY lies.

  • B Dev B Dev 1 year ago

    Hi Todd,
    Your larger point about the pressing need to elucidate the huge implications of Big Data is certainly valid. Uncharted territory here.
    The likely problem of doing so is ever-diminishing returns. Just as in the legal system, ever more dissection, nuancing and refinement of arcane details of legal opinion eventually lead to a sort of intellectual gray goo… which provides unsure footing in all cases. A clever critic can use the wishy-washyness of it all to create seemingly legitimate and convincing argument for any side of an issue.
    I can posit any number of supreme court cases that use all sorts of legal sophistry to come to absurd conclusions… yet they can all be tortuously, legally justified. Common sense goes flying out the window. Most prominent are the cases that opine conclusions which are clearly un- or anti-constitutional, yet all citizens are expected to abide by them.
    This result, of course, leads to legal tyranny of the mind, and horrendous abuse of force. Anything can be justified, and any organization (gov’t, corps) with more legal power than that possessed by a sovereign individual will inevitably gather in more and more forceful capacity, and the legal stamp of approval for using it. Virtually no one can understand the complex jargon that authorizes abuses, and experts are then forever needed to make sense of the smallest incidents. Meanwhile, power concentrates exponentially, and we all lose.
    The only way out is to make things simple, clear and uncomplicated for anyone who is reasonably capable of logical thought. The man on the street needs to know that: his money is sound, not fiat (our fundamental problem); his legal status is sovereign under common law, not a corporate serf (U.S. is a corp); his property is of clear ownership, not underminable by edict; his person is sacrosanct, not to be violated without his approval.
    Likewise, a person’s privacy is a subset of inviolable property rights. They cannot be legally invalidated, and any organization or individual doing so shall be shut down and penalized severely.
    You have to draw the line somewhere, and I prefer it to be drawn well toward the simple and clear side of things, which irritates fearful control freaks no end.

  • 99world 99world 1 year ago

    Wonderful World Media has made an exclusive interview with him during the time in Hong Kong. Please find the link – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy7cor61At0