SOME AMERICANS IN THIS CYBER AGE…

The collapse of American pride with regard to civil liberties has been swift and decisive. There does not seem to be a man or a woman in the USA who does not think today that Big Brother has been invasive and almost criminally so, though there may be some who feign that they ‘understand national security imperatives’ and are therefore complicit.

But the signals are clear. The late night comedians are having a field day, and this is Obamagate. Snowden and Julian Assange may be down -- but they are not out.

The U.S national security establishment launched a massive cyber snooping operation against her own citizens just because the U.S of A could. Authority figures felt that the ownership of the technology gave them a license of sorts to do as they like and collect what was hilariously referred to in the tech-jargon as ‘meta data’ , as if that reference would somehow sanitize all the snooping into people’s phone and e-mail records, simply because people could not penetrate beyond that esoteric techno-speak.

The problem is that this, the very advantage of the ownership of the technology, also translates as the downside. When the technology is owned and therefore controlled, there is hubris. The Establishment, ergo, felt omnipotent.

Cyber ciphers

Barack Obama

Julian Assange

What they didn’t figure out was that the very advantages of the new penetrative technology almost made it more porous -- what’s spread all over the place, those cyber ciphers of the modern information age as if running water or the air we breathe, could also be mined by others for information because, for those who knew the ‘secret codes’, the technology was so penetrable and at hand.

This eventuality that the establishment did not bargain for eventually created unlikely heroes – cyber-nerds turned watchdogs, whistleblowers and ultimately sentinels for ‘core American values’ that are ostensibly cherished by all US citizens because the Founding Fathers thought that these are the values American society should be founded upon.

These cyber nerds -- the Assanges and Snowdens of the world -- however have a whole set of sympathizers and followers that social sentinels in a different age would not have had, and that is precisely due to the fact that the new technology that the Americans so love has also formed a global brotherhood.

Everybody that uses Facebook or Twitter -- and there are literally millions, or is it billions -- feel empathy with the Snowden cause. Nobody likes to be spooked this way particularly if all they have been doing is to have phone sex, or cyber sex, whatever that means!

Arab Springs

The Obama presidency would never be able to salvage the moral high ground that has been lost to this scandal and this is why these days the commentators in the U.S, those such as the irrepressible Cenck Uygur are saying that Barack Obama does not have any credibility left at all.

You know -- this is funny in many ways. People say that many street campaigns that were called spontaneous uprisings, the Arab Springs and so forth were marshaled through the force of the new cyber-technologies.

They say Twitter did it or Facbook did it -- all those uprisings against tyrants in Tahrir square and everything that followed. The Americans and Barack Obama for reasons that do not have to be gone into here, enthused most about these new technologies, and the resulting ‘spontaneous uprisings.’

The new Tahrir square however is in CYBERSPACE per se. If cyber space was the location for the forward march of freedom of movement and justice, how would cyber activists feel when their own territory is being vandalized?

They would retaliate of course and retaliate is what they did by making it clear at the very outset that they have closed ranks with the new cyber heroes Assange and Snowden, and of course many others that may be out their doing what they did.

As for the American establishment -- what can be said to its heavyweights and savants? As they say, the best laid pans of mice and men …