Does State Spying Make Us Safer?: The Munk Debate On Mass Surveillance by Michael Hayden;Alan Dershowitz;Glenn Greenwald;Alexis Ohanian

Author:Michael Hayden;Alan Dershowitz;Glenn Greenwald;Alexis Ohanian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2014-11-18T16:33:46+00:00

Pre-Debate Interviews

with Rudyard Griffiths

GLENN GREENWALD IN CONVERSATION

WITH RUDYARD GRIFFITHS

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: My name is Rudyard Griffiths, and I am the moderator of the Munk Debates. I will be interviewing all of tonight’s debaters in the next hour, starting with Glenn Greenwald, who is arguing against the resolution, “Be it resolved: state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms.”

Glenn, terrific to have you here because you are an essential part of this debate. In fact, you and Edward Snowden have been at the centre of this global conversation over the last eleven months, and I bet it’s been tough at times. I know there is going to be a lot to your argument, but what is the key point that you want to say to a skeptic out there who is suggesting that state surveillance might not be such a bad thing?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the main question is, what do we mean by state surveillance? Nobody would dispute the validity of the state’s surveillance of specific targets for whom there was credible evidence that they were engaged in plotting terrorist attacks or other violent or criminal activities. Unfortunately this idea has almost nothing to do with the actual system of state surveillance that has been implemented. It is not at all targeted or discriminating but is instead indiscriminate and even targets those who aren’t suspected of criminal activity. It is a system where they put entire populations, hundreds of millions of people, under a surveillance microscope without regard for whether they’ve done anything wrong. It’s the ubiquity of the system — the indiscriminate nature of it — that makes it so menacing.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: But what do you make of people who say that if you want to find a needle in a haystack, you need to have access to the whole haystack? It’s optimistic to think that we could target one terrorist, but if we want to find out whom that terrorist talked to, and whom that person talked to, bulk collection is the way to go.

GLENN GREENWALD: We don’t accept that way of thinking in any other context. If we were to tell people that we wanted to put monitors in their homes to watch what they are doing at all times simply because we want to find people committing crimes, the public would instinctively understand why that is repellent.

The other point I would refute about mass surveillance is that it assumes rather falsely that it’s efficient to find terrorists by monitoring everybody — the exact opposite is true. If you are collecting billions of telephone calls every single day, which is what the NSA and its partners are doing, it becomes almost impossible to find out who is actually plotting terrorist attacks. They’ve collected so much information on regular people it makes it difficult to identify radicals, those who support terrorist organizations, or the people who want to detonate a bomb on an airplane or plant a bomb at the Boston Marathon. It is completely inefficient.

Terrorism is the pretext but not the real reason for the surveillance system.

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