Permanent Record

ACLU v. Clapper was a notable victory, to be sure. A crucial precedent
was set. The court declared that the American public had standing:
American citizens had the right to stand in a court of law and challenge the
government’s officially secret system of mass surveillance. But as the
numerous other cases that resulted from the disclosures continue to wend
their slow and deliberate ways through the courts, it becomes ever clearer to
me that the American legal resistance to mass surveillance was just the beta
phase of what has to be an international opposition movement, fully
implemented across both governments and private sector.
The reaction of technocapitalists to the disclosures was immediate and
forceful, proving once again that with extreme hazards come unlikely allies.
The documents revealed an NSA so determined to pursue any and all
information it perceived as being deliberately kept from it that it had
undermined the basic encryption protocols of the Internet—making
citizens’ financial and medical records, for example, more vulnerable, and
in the process harming businesses that relied on their customers entrusting
them with such sensitive data. In response, Apple adopted strong default
encryption for its iPhones and iPads, and Google followed suit for its
Android products and Chromebooks. But perhaps the most important
private-sector change occurred when businesses throughout the world set
about switching their website platforms, replacing http (Hypertext Transfer

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Protocol) with the encrypted https (the S signifies security), which helps
prevent third-party interception of Web traffic. The year 2016 was a
landmark in tech history, the first year since the invention of the Internet
that more Web traffic was encrypted than unencrypted.
The Internet is certainly more secure now than it was in 2013, especially
given the sudden global recognition of the need for encrypted tools and
apps. I’ve been involved with the design and creation of a few of these
myself, through my work heading the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a
nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and empowering public-
interest journalism in the new millennium. A major part of the
organization’s brief is to preserve and strengthen First and Fourth
Amendment rights through the development of encryption technologies. To
that end, the FPF financially supports Signal, an encrypted texting and
calling platform created by Open Whisper Systems, and develops
SecureDrop (originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz), an open-source
submission system that allows media organizations to securely accept
documents from anonymous whistleblowers and other sources. Today,
SecureDrop is available in ten languages and used by more than seventy
media organizations around the world, including the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Guardian, and the New Yorker.
In a perfect world, which is to say in a world that doesn’t exist, just laws
would make these tools obsolete. But in the only world we have, they have
never been more necessary. A change in the law is infinitely more difficult
to achieve than a change in a technological standard, and as long as legal
innovation lags behind technological innovation institutions will seek to
abuse that disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to
independent, open-source hardware and software developers to close that
gap by providing the vital civil liberties protections that the law may be
unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.
In my current situation, I’m constantly reminded of the fact that the law
is country-specific, whereas technology is not. Every nation has its own
legal code but the same computer code. Technology crosses borders and
carries almost every passport. As the years go by, it has become
increasingly apparent to me that legislatively reforming the surveillance
regime of the country of my birth won’t necessarily help a journalist or
dissident in the country of my exile, but an encrypted smartphone might.

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I
NTERNATIONALLY
, 
THE DISCLOSURES
helped to revive debates about
surveillance in places with long histories of abuses. The countries whose
citizenries were most opposed to American mass surveillance were those
whose governments had most cooperated with it, from the Five Eyes
nations (especially the UK, whose GCHQ remains the NSA’s primary