tortilla con sal, January 16th 2014

A striking aspect of the coverage of revelations about global mass espionage by the United States and its allies is the way those revelations are associated in the West with libertarian progressive politics. That makes sense in terms of the centre-right dominated politics of North America and Europe. But from an anti-imperialist majority world perspective, it is clear that US patriots like William Binney, Thomas Drake or Edward Snowden may object to executive abuse and inefficiency but not necessarily at all to US and allied foreign policy as such.

Likewise problematic is the very clear funding relationship between Edward Snowden's intermediaries like Glenn Greenwald or Laura Poitras and the US corporate sector. That was true even before the lucrative multimillion deal Glenn Greenwald negotiated with Pierre Omidyar, a billionaire whose business relationships include the corporate National Security Agency contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden's former employer,. That kind of problematic networking relationship also bedevils the work of Wikileaks and Julian Assange.

So while leading exponents of dissident Western opinion stress their libertarian civil and political rights agenda, it is not at all the case that their global politics are otherwise especially progressive, let alone anti-imperialist. Events in Ivory Coast, Libya, Syria and elsewhere have shown that Western progressive opinion is blatantly neocolonial. Progressive and radical Western opinion overwhelmingly accepted and even supported their countries' economic sanctions, media psychological warfare, military aggression and terrorism against legitimate governments and their peoples in both Libya and Syria as they have done also, to a somewhat lesser degree, against Iran.

In one sense, this contrast may stem ultimately from unresolved arguments around free will and necessity, or freedom and nature, derived from classical Western philosophers like Immanuel Kant and his precursors. Thanks to their material advantages, won from centuries of genocide and enslavement, people in both North America and Europe are secure and comfortable enough to be able to prioritize the liberal version of civil and political freedom as a categorical imperative. Most people in the majority world tend to focus more on aspects of social, economic and cultural freedom offering them secure, decent conditions of material life.

For example, the ALBA country bloc in Latin America – Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela plus the Caribbean island nations of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica and St Vincent and the Grenadines - reflect this difference. The main ALBA countries supported the legitimate Libyan government and currently steadfastly support the legitimate Syrian government against those countries' foreign controlled, funded, supplied and trained minority armed revolts. They also support Iran's position against the Western powers. Many Western supporters of the ALBA country governments tend to avoid the conflict ALBA country foreign policy implies for their own politics.

In the case of Edward Snowden, anti-imperialist governments in Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua were officially prepared to offer him political asylum on the basis of the humanitarian plight in which Snowden found himself. But that good will self-evidently conflicted with the political reality both of Snowden's own confused politics and the undoubted seriousness of US threats of retaliation. This dilemma is clear from the sanction Rafael Correa's government applied to the Ecuadoran official in his country's London embassy who facilitated consular documents allowing Snowden to leave Hong Kong.

In general, progressive movements in North America and Europe have fallen into bewildered disarray, apparently unable to work out a coherent, viable strategy to achieve political power in their own countries. Despite that undeniable failure, progressive and radical writers still feel qualified to persistently attack, for example, Daniel Ortega, Evo Morales or Rafael Correa. Progressive and radical Western critics accuse those leaders of being too accommodating to foreign corporations, of not respecting civil and political rights or of failing to protect the environment or indigenous peoples.

In fact, those leaders enjoy overwhelming broad and deep popular support at grass roots because they are making revolutionary changes in their countries' economies and societies in favour of  previously excluded, impoverished majorities. As often as not, Western critics of those leaders are playing to their own domestic gallery rather than addressing the political and economic realities of the countries whose leaders they attack. The same is true of the various alternative media outlets in which they publish.

In that context, the controversy around the revelations of Edward Snowden and their fallout has tended to confirm how readily Western progressive opinion can be manipulated around injustice affecting civil and political freedoms in the liberal tradition. The current controversy over  illegal eavesdropping and data collection, touches on an abuse of power that has been systemic for decades. Digital technology and the Internet extended its reach exponentially. At the same time, Western progressive and radical movements have been relatively ineffectual in defending their social and economic freedoms against systematic corporate depredation.

Recent revelations in corporate media like Der Spiegel have finally begun to focus attention on the fundamental reason for anger and resentment of US allied governments like Germany, or friendly governments like Brazil, at aggressive US espionage against those countries' governments. Until those revelations, the global corporate media had focused on the general human rights issues raised by the carefully managed disclosures through 2013 of the material made available by Edward Snowden. The latest published information again confirms what many already suspected on the basis of previous reports and of recent developments in technology over the last decade or so.

One of the journalists leading the work on the reports appearing in Der Spiegel and elsewhere is the  investigative writer and software specialist, Jacob Appelbaum. Over the last couple of years, Appelbaum has given various cogent presentations of his investigative research. As in the case of Edward Snowden, his contributions are useful in terms of contributing to a more detailed understanding of how the United States government security services and their allied counterparts use and abuse surveillance technology and global comunications infrastructure.

Appelbaum's position seems to be somewhat different to that of Glenn Greenwald. In Greenwald's case it is fair to question his alliance - and that of his film maker and journalist colleague Laura Poitras - with solid corporate funders who have strong links either to the US government itself or to US government contractors. Appelbaum's well-informed criticisms have prompted a level of official and unofficial US government persecution forcing Appelbaum into effective exile in Europe.

Even so, the presentations Appelbaum gives of his material suggest assumptions and attitudes that people living outside North America and Europe may well question. Particularly questionable is Appelbaum's suggestion that anyone should be surprised at the revelations he and people like Edward Snowden have uncovered. His suggestion confuses fascination over obscure technological details with political expectations many of which he himself shares.

Nothing revealed by Appelbaum, should cause the least surprise to people in the majority world who have long and bitter cause to reject Western pretensions to any kind of moral superiority. Western powers have always abused technology to get what they want. Prior to World War Two, Spain, France, Britain, and Italy all abused their superior military technology to deliver chemical weapons in attacks against civilians from North Africa to Iraq to Abyssinia.

The US developed the Manhattan project to menace its enemies with nuclear destruction and carried that menace to gratuitous evil fruition in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Civilian populations from North Korea to Vietnam to Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya and Syria have been murdered by Western military technology. The Western powers have assassinated Iranian scientists by proxy through their ally Israel with complete impunity. The Western media take for granted attempts at political assassination of leaders like Fidel Castro and Muammar al Gaddhafi.

So it is perplexing that Jacob Appelbaum expects people generally to be surprised about the political aspect of his revelations. Similarly, no one mildly interested in wireless technology or nanotechnology will find especially unusual the technological revelations he makes, however fascinating the technical detail may be. In Latin America a large minority, perhaps even a majority, take for granted that the US authorities murdered President Hugo Chávez by somehow applying radiation to induce the cancer that killed him.

That wholly rational hypothesis too seems to be a candidate for Appelbaum's variety of surprise. Appelbaum's motive for his technological enthusiasm and his campaign for rights to privacy and freedom of public information is solidly within the Western liberal philosophical tradition. He has expressed open admiration for the skills and acumen of the founders and developers of Google. His main focus in recent years seems to have been the development of the Tor free software aimed at circumventing hostile surveillance, either by the US authorities or anyone else.

In fact, others have already pointed out that the Tor project has received major funding from Google, from Human Rights Watch (itself funded by CIA facilitator George Soros) and from the US Department of Defence. The very nature of free software makes it vulnerable to social engineering that can enable corruption or abuse of technical security aspects of the Tor concept's implementation. Appelbaum's own analysis makes clear how hardware infrastructure is vulnerable both to physical tampering and to determined efforts at interception, rendering software counter-surveillance ingenuity largely moot.

In North America and Europe, the civil and political rights arguments between governments and activists like Appelbaum or Assange over mass surveillance and organizations like Wikileaks will certainly continue to receive much attention, well within the acceptable parameters of mainstream liberalism. Outside the West, those arguments resonate mostly as one more expression of the megalomania of the US elites and their European allies. They also reflect the ever more introspective natural bias of North American and European progressive opinion.

That bias explains a great deal about the inability of Western progressive and radical opinion to recognize current global anti-imperialist imperatives. One of those imperatives is support for the resistance front of Syria, Iran and Hezbollah against both Western sanctioned Zionist terrorist aggression and that of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf State counterparts. Another is a realistic acknowledgment of the revolutionary change the ALBA countries have achieved both internally for their own peoples and in the wider region. As Jorge Capelán has argued, it is past time for Western radical and revolutionary opinion to decolonize itself.