If theres one thing thats beyond question, it is that Mike Rogers, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA) loves his country. In an interview with Calcalist, he repeated the word values no fewer than 27 times. But even a patriot like Rogers believes the use of technology to track down citizens during the Coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis is one step too far.

The first thing we need to do is step back, he asserts. We need to ask what type of information needs to be collected to generate insights that would be instrumental to better understand the pandemic. This is a legitimate question to ask. The knowledge and insights generated need to reflect the values of our society. Public health does not render privacy irrelevant or marginal. I dont buy it. In the same way, I dont think privacy should be held up is above all else. Its not a black and white issue.

Rogers, 60, served in the U.S. Navy for 37 years. He started his career as a ship driver, as he likes to call it. In 2018, he retired from his position as head of the countrys top intelligence unit, after serving under two presidents, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Shortly afterward, he joined Israeli cyber group Team8 as an advisor. Team8 was founded by brigadier general (Ret.) Nadav Zafrir, a former commander of the Israel Defense Forces Military intelligence Unit 8200, which is often referred to as Israels NSA. This interview was conducted on Zoom, which Rogers joined via his private Gmail address, evidence of the challenges posed to privacy even for a veteran spook like himself during Covid-19 era.

Rogers assumed office as head of the NSA at a particularly complicated time; a short while after Edward Snowden, an NSA sub-contractor, leaked a massive trove of documents exposing how the U.S. government implemented methodical surveillance on millions of people across the globe, both American citizens and foreigners. The saga ended with both Snowden and NSA remaining controversial entities. However, while the young man found himself in exile in Russia, the NSA was legally acquitted and politically pardoned, a problem that Rogers acknowledges.

Look, Im not an idiot. It was clear to me that our society and the world at large were trying to figure out what had happened, he says of the aftermath of the Snowden affair. I tried to determine whether I should be worried, whether the law was being abided by. The people at the NSA were also shocked by the public reaction because they knew they had followed the law. And if their actions were meant to protect the citizens, why were they perceived as the bad guys?

Despite siding with the intelligence forces, Rogers too admits that the government sometimes abuses its power. This is not a new phenomenon, he conceded. The basic principle on which the U.S. was founded is that individual rights are primary and that the state must not be allowed to trample on them. This is the cornerstone of the society.

However, he said, Some degree of distrust has always existed between the state and its citizens. We must acknowledge the cases in which the government exceeded its authority, for example, during the Vietnam War, when we used intelligence capabilities to find out what citizens think about the war and to what extent they support the government. These were exceptional actions. As a result of that period in our history, we have the foundations that guide us to this day closer oversight of intelligence work, by congressional committees, and an external approval mechanism, which also led to the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts (FISA).

Still, when pressed, Rogers admits that when a civil society loses its trust in its elected officials and the courts, once they no longer reflect their values, the country has a problem. Peoples trust in the checks and balances is on a decline. Following the Snowden affair, some congress committees stated clearly that the NSA was in full compliance with the law and overseen by elected officials. They told the citizens not to worry because We supervise the work. But it was not enough. People were saying that the politicians do not reflect their concerns and values. The current oversight mechanism failed to give the public the confidence we thought it would. The FISA courts too were criticized in a similar vein, arguing that unlike in ordinary courts, the government stands trial with no one presenting counter arguments.

The public distrust of the NSA posed Rogers with a significant challenge: explaining how the agency works. We needed to acknowledge that the trust of the citizens we serve is one of the most important factors for us. We need to carry out our missions effectively, efficiently, in full compliance with the law, and do so while reflecting societys values. To ensure we meet these criteria, we needed to modify the way we work. I wanted people to know ours is an honest organization that recognizes its mistakes and learns from them, and that if required, we will be able to modify our mode of operations.

But the narrative regarding the Snowden affair still divides the American public, which is strongly concerned with matters of privacy. The US government regards Snowden as a fugitive criminal whose actions have harmed intelligence assets. Large parts of the public, however, regard Snowden as a heroic whistleblower. I dont consider it in terms of victory or defeat, says Rogers when asked if NSA was victorious in changing the narrative. The important thing is that we did our job lawfully and in a manner that reflects our society. I was happy that when the public debate finally ended, we were able to retain most of the authorities and legal frameworks that we had.

Was there a chance this would not materialize?

Absolutely.

How can you tell whether something has changed if everything takes place away from public scrutiny?

Every exposure of our activity has the potential to prevent us from doing our job. Hence, democratic society created a legal framework and an oversight mechanism that allows elected public officials to supervise our work directly. The courts give us no blank checks. Whenever they felt we had not justified our requests, they did not grant them. I never took the freedom of action for granted. It was always important for me to work in a manner that reflects our society and never knowingly violate the law. Never. I believe it is important for society as a wholeand it is evident today with the pandemic that the solutions reflect social values. We do not want to compromise on who we are in the name of security. When you do that, the other side wins.

While Rogers talks passionately about the importance of checks and balances in democratic countries, in Israel the debate over the breach of citizens privacy is subdued, even though both the police and the Internal Security Agency have managed to obtain free access to track citizens mobile phones. Checks and balances are a foundation of democracy, argues Rogers. When we resort to searching for solutions that involve knowledge about private people, for example, during this Covid-19 pandemic, we must ensure the solutions are equipped with checks and balances and instill confidence and trust among the public. I do not like absolute solutions. I prefer to develop ones that have external oversight and regulation.

When Rogers is pressed with questions on the gloomy trade-off between citizens rights and public health, or even national security, he takes us back 70 years. Perhaps because being critical about real-time events is difficult. In December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we deemed it reasonable to force American citizens of Japanese origin out of their jobs or schools, and place them in detention camps. When we look back at this practice today, it is beyond us how we could have done such a thing. It runs contrary to all of our values! You dont treat civilians in this way! Stepping back during a crisis is one of the most difficult things to do, but it allows you to understand not only what you cannot do, but also what is wrong to do. The fact that you can do something does not mean you need to do it.

The delicate balancing of civil rights and privacy becomes even more intricate because of the momentous leaps achieved by the information revolutions. Technological developments in the private sector sent governments and their various branches on an incessant pursuit for control. Take, for example, governments attempts to obtain remote access to smartphones or computer systems in a manner that bypasses the end-to-end encryption of Facebook or WhatsApp chats. Encryptions are vital in the world we live in, says Rogers. Finding information security solutions without encryption is hard. I do not like the idea of neutralizing the encryption, but I am not fond of the expression back door either (referring to the Administrations demand for built-in access to private computer systems, V.A.) Its an expression that reflects stealthy activities. I want the front door, with many locks on it, and I want control over who has access to the keys and the terms under which the door can be opened.

President Obama a constitutional lawyer by training once told us we must acknowledge that one of the guiding principles of the U.S. judicial system is that no information is beyond the reach of the government, as long as it abides by the legal framework. But the reality is that technology has passed the legal and constitutional frameworks, making encryption their poster child. Im not saying its bad. Thats just the way it is.

So there is no privacy at all?

No, there is no privacy. The law stipulates that phone companies must have the means to monitor calls in case the court orders them to do so. I keep reminding people that this capability is part of a legal framework. The federal administration cannot tap a persons phone just because it wants to. Telephone companies will not do that unless they receive a court order, which can also be appealed before an external authority. The system of checks and balances allows a range of worldviews to be heard.

The legal frameworks were also designed to save time and resources. If it is designed by a human, then a human can compromise it, explains Rogers. The question is how long it would take and what resources need to be allocated. So we are looking for new technologies that would overcome the limitations. This is life. You develop capabilities and then the counter-capabilities. Ive spent 37 years of my life doing that.

Today, Rogers is an advisor to Team8, a cybersecurity group that develops defensive capabilities. Discussing the work offensive cyber organizations, which suffer from a terrible public image, sometimes justifiably, Rogers says they stand to profit from the Covid-19 pandemic, not just because the number of people connecting to the network is pushing the existing security infrastructure to the limit, but also because of humans tendency to try to make sense of the new reality. Users are receiving huge amounts of files about coronavirus, creating an excellent opportunity for a country that uses focused cyberattacks, such as phishing.

But Rogers is optimistic about the resourcefulness and resilience of the virtual world, The infrastructure responded well to the challenge. We can maintain communication in a world where physical presence has become dangerous. Within a short time, we have established new normalcy with the means necessary to continue communicating, doing business or keeping in touch with friends and family. Now is the time to see how we make the new structure resilient, the risks it faces and its future. What will the world look like after coronavirus? What lessons do we take from this situation? Which skills do we need to build? There are many questions to ponder.

The former commander of Unit 8200: It doesnt have to be either-or. Some solutions can keep you healthy while protecting your privacy.

"My view of the current crisis is more romantic than Mikes, says Nadav Zafrir, co-founder of Team8 and a consulting client of former NSA Head Mike Rogers. I see a dramatically-positive side to the crisis. If Covid-19 were to have taken place in the 1990s, the world would be falling apart. The things we are doing today are fantastic. Just sending everyone home overnight is an amazing accomplishment.

Everyone talks about the need to track the population, restart the economy and maintain health as running contrary to privacy. I do not think this is an either-or situation. Take cryptography, for example. You can take encrypted information and still run computing operations on it. The crisis has shown us you cannot privatize everything. The State must retain some responsibility, but this does not mean we have no responsibility. We need to provide enabling technologies. We know how to take the healthcare information of confirmed cases and run queries on data received from telecoms. The company that provides the information does not know what information we are looking for and on whom, and those who know what we look for cannot see all of the information. All this can be ensured by an enabling technology called homomorphic encryption. We started the project with open code for a purpose. This approach allowed us to create solutions that address both sides of the equation because until a vaccine is available, we will not be able to resume our normal life.

Read this article:
Former NSA Chief: Values Must Not be Compromised in the Name of Security, Not Even During a Pandemic - CTech

Photo: NPR (courtesy of Edward Snowden)

From my latest for Law & Liberty:

It is easy to detest Edward Snowden. His smug, know-it-all attitude, his numerous apparent factual fabrications, and his self-serving moralizing as he places himself securely among the people of principle who became martyrs to an overweening U.S. government are incessant irritants. He told the media that he had been triggered by the March 2013 testimony of James Clapper, then director of U.S. national intelligence, in which Clapper allegedly lied under oath to assert that NSA did not engage in bulk collection of American citizens communicationsexcept that Snowdens efforts to sabotage that spying had begun many months before.

The sheer volume of the documents and the irrelevance of so many of them to his central claim are also off-putting. Are we really supposed to care about some scholar in Indonesia who applied for a teaching job in Iran just because an NSA video viewed by Snowden caught his cute toddler son clambering over his computer keyboard? The whole point of the Patriot Act was to prevent Islamic terrorismscarcely unknown in Indonesiafrom migrating to U.S. shores as it did before 9/11. It is not surprising that President Barack Obama declined to pardon Snowden before he left office in 2017 despite intensive lobbying by celebrities and NGOs. Fellow leaker Chelsea Manning, whose sentence Obama did commute, had at least served time for her crimes. While there is little evidence that Snowden was an active foreign agent, those who believe he was clandestinely serving the interests of, say, Russia or China, can be forgiven.

The fact remains, however, that Snowden did perform a public service whose value becomes increasingly evident as time passes. NSAs defenders, who include the prominent libertarian legal scholar Richard Epstein, have argued that the agency didnt really eavesdrop on Americans electronic communications, but simply collected metadataraw records of numbers called, emails sent, credit-cards used, and so forth. To examine the contents of any particular communication, agents must obtain a warrant from a FISA-Court judge, the argument goes. The most compelling response to that comes from Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett, who pointed out in a 2015 article for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that such blanket data seizures are simply 21st-century versions of the general warrants that allowed British authorities to rifle through homes and papers looking for contraband. The Fourth Amendment was drafted specifically to protect against such practices, hence the amendments requirement that search warrants describe particularly the items to be searched or seized.

Furthermore, as evidence mounts that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice grossly abused the FISA-Court system to spy on Donald Trumps presidential campaign in 2016 (knowingly using the fabulist, Democratic Party-commissioned Steele dossier to obtain warrants, for example), it is obvious that the secretive wholesale surveillance system that Snowden uncovered is in need of drastic reform. In 2015 Congress amended the Patriot Act to limit bulk collection of data, but NSA continues to intercept millions of records under the revised standards. The Justice Department continues to request that the FISA Court authorize more than a thousand search warrants a year on Americans, mostly for electronic surveillance. Compliant FISA judges grant nearly all those requests.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Charlotte Allen

Like Loading...

Related

View original post here:
Me for Law & Liberty: Edward Snowden was the smart-aleck kid youd like to smackbut he uncovered the same surveillance vigilantism that marked the...

Did former President Obama himself leak the audio of his conversation with some of his former administration officials, in which he falsely claimed that former National Security Advisory Mike Flynn was charged with perjury (it was false statements to the FBI) while describing the Barr Justice Departments dismissal of the Flynn case as putting the rule of law at risk? Or did a former Obama aide take liberties (and possibly violate the law) by recording and leaking the conversation? Well probably never know the answer to that one, but what we do know for certain is this: Barack ObamaBarack Hussein ObamaObama criticism gets under GOP's skin Ex-GOP chairman slams McConnell for saying Obama should 'keep his mouth shut' Polls show Biden has edge with voters who don't like their choices MORE is the last person on earth who should try to lecture anyone about the rule of law.

It was then-Sen. Obama who in 2005 lambasted the PATRIOT Act as a mortal threat to constitutional liberties, and who two years later during his presidential run said he would end warrantless wiretapping of Americans. Instead, Obama went on to urge renewal of the controversial and ineffective surveillance that Edward Snowden subsequently exposed during Obamas second term in office, and then sought Snowdens prosecution for exposing the very warrantless surveillance Obama had previously pledged to end.

In response to the 2008 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report about the CIAs rendition and torture program, the newly elected President Obama admitted that we tortured some folks but then told Americans to look forwards, not backwardsnot firing a single CIA employee involved in the torture program, including the Agencys now-current director, Gina HaspelGina Cheri HaspelObama's 'rule of law' hypocrisy Former CIA chief: Not 'right' for Haspel to applaud at State of the Union Schiff schedules public hearing with US intel chief MORE.

Obama arguably violated the Constitution and the War Powers Act by ordering military action against Libya in 2011, despite no attack by Libya on U.S. interests or personnel anywhere in the world prior to Obamas green-lighting a military campaign without congressional consultation, much less authorization.

Obamas constitutional overreach on immigration resulted in a deadlocked Supreme Court effectively vitiating his executive order, further setting back efforts to bring actual reform to Americas broken immigration system.

Americas 44th president set all too many precedents for executive power grabs and miscarriages of justice, as so many of his predecessors did before him. Obamas lack of self-awareness regarding his own role, and that of prior chief executives, in setting the stage for Trump is what makes his hypocrisy in this episode all the more amazing. And the idea that his running mate and vice president for eight years is behaving any differently nowconsider the Tara Reade episodewould be laughable were the stakes this November not so incredibly high.

That Washingtons Political Class is self-serving, corrupt, and not terribly concerned with the daily struggles of most Americans is something many of those voters long ago recognized. The hope Obama promised was a chimera, and Make American Great Again was the cynical fantasy Trump sold a desperate, and gullible, white working class in his first campaign. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, protecting Americans from a genuine threat to their health and safety is the furthest thing from Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpNew York Times: Reporter who called for CDC chief's resignation went 'too far' GOP's Don Bacon and challenger neck-and-neck in Democratic poll Cheney defends Fauci: 'We need his expertise' to defeat coronavirus MOREs mind; his focus, as ever, is on only himself. But it is the gall of Obamas rule of law riff that underscores his political fraudulenceit is the flip side of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellObama criticism gets under GOP's skin On The Money: House Democrats unveil trillion coronavirus relief package | SCOTUS divided in Trump financial records case | Fed under pressure to speed up, expand emergency loans McConnell, GOP senators support exempting VA health funds from budget caps MOREs (R-Ky.) rigged impeachment trial of Trump earlier this year.

Obamas failure to actually hold his own predecessor, and key federal bureaucrats at the CIA, NSA, and FBI, responsible for their War on Terror misdeeds at home and abroad makes it easier to understand why the FBI has been able, for so long, to abuse the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court process to improperly spy on Americans. The reality is that Obama, and many of his predecessors over the last 100 years, took deliberate actions that hastened the decline of the rule of law we now confront at the federal level in 21st century America. Our path out of this legal and ethical morass must begin with the understanding that ending out-of-control presidential power is the most important, long-term task facing Congress and the nation.

Former CIA analyst and ex-House Senior Policy Advisor Patrick Eddington is a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute.

Go here to read the rest:
Obama's 'rule of law' hypocrisy | TheHill - The Hill

Next week the Senate is poised to resurrect some federal surveillance powers that expired in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. A handful of senators are hoping to force through reforms to better protect Americans' privacy.

In March the USA Freedom Act expired, somewhat unceremoniously, as lawmakers were unable to reach a consensus on a renewal as the pandemic began to pick up steam and overtake all public policy priorities.

The USA Freedom Act authorized (but restricted) the collection of Americans' phone and internet record metadata that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been gathering without citizen knowledge before Edward Snowden exposed it. A compromise bill, the USA Freedom Act added some buffers to how the NSA would collect the data and required more reporting of the activities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts, so citizens would have a better sense of the extent that this "foreign" surveillance was in fact targeting Americans.

The NSA has since abandoned the metadata collection, which had proven ineffective at tracking down terror threats even as it violated Americans' Fourth Amendment rights. But the Act has other surveillance components (authorizing roving wiretaps, tracking so-called "lone wolf" terrorists). And even though the NSA has stopped using its metadata collection powers, President Donald Trump's administration has asked for the entire USA Freedom Act to be renewed, intact, permanently.

Fortunately, that's not going to happen: The House passed a renewal bill in March that officially killed off the records program once and for all. Now surveillance critics in the Senate, such as Rand Paul (RKy.), Mike Lee (RUtah) and Ron Wyden (DOre.), are pushing for further reforms to the way the government targets American citizens for secret surveillance. Their demands for amendments to the House's bill stopped the bill from moving forward in March. Now the Senate plans to consider the House's bill along with these proposed amendments.

The USA Freedom Act played no role in the FBI's use of the FISA court to secretly wiretap former Trump aide Carter Page. But the discovery that the FBI played fast and loose with the truth when requesting these warrants from the FISA court, and the subsequent evidence that the FBI regularly does a terrible job of documenting its evidence when targeting any Americans for FISA surveillance, have created an opening for civil libertarians to call for stronger privacy protections.

The Hill reports:

Sen.Rand Paul (RKy.) will get a vote on his amendment that would bar the FISA court from issuing warrants for American citizens and instead require law enforcement agencies such as the FBI to obtain a warrant from a normal court established under Article III of the Constitution.

Sens.Mike Lee (RUtah) and Patrick Leahy (DVt.) will get a vote on their amendment to require the appointment of amicus curiae, or outside advisers, with expertise in privacy and civil liberties to advise the FISA court on surveillance warrants.

Sens.Steve Daines (RMont.) andRon Wyden (DOre.) will get a vote on an amendment to bar law enforcement from obtaining internet browsing and search history without a warrant.

These are all great amendments. Unfortunately, they will probably fail. Far too many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are against serious surveillance reforms.

Senators like Paul are banking on Trump's outrage over what happened to Page to push these additional reforms through. Establishment Republicans and Democrats are banking on Trump only caring about how surveillance affects him and the people around him.

We'll soon find out which side is correct. My money's on the establishment, but I'll be happy to be wrong this time.

See the article here:
FISA Surveillance and Possible Reforms Are Back on the Senate's Agenda - Reason

Mass surveillance by means of abusing the capabilities of mobile hardware and software and with the help of tech corporations is not exactly a new thing; after all, didnt Edward Snowden make a whole kerfuffle about it back in 2013.

One of the perhaps most striking results of the Snowden revelations was how quickly the idea of unwarranted, and all too often warrantless, snooping on regular citizens got normalized, and accepted by most of them.

With the coronavirus pandemic, the talk of mass surveillance for the greater good and when is it supposedly ever not? is resurfacing again.

Microsofts MSN has a long article about this phenomenon.

Double your web browsing speed with today's sponsor. Get Brave.

From the headline, we learn that its the same old story with a new twist: the pandemic. But we are also told that cellphone monitoring is spreading and with it an uneasy tolerance of surveillance all that we already knew.

The piece takes a look at how exactly this spreading of monitoring is taking place right now. Its driven, at least in part, by fear. Thus a phone app in Turkey designed to tell people if their neighborhood had become a coronavirus hotspot wants users to surrender a shocking amount of personal information: identity number, a parents name, data about their relatives, their own health history and permission to track their movements. Its one of many of Turkeys invasive measures, that, according to the report, receive little to no backlash.

But those who criticize this type of surveillance that is now cropping up all over the world do it from two points of view: first, they question if data harvested in this way is actually helpful in stemming the surge of the pandemic, even if you think the trade-off between personal sovereignty and rights is fair at this point in time.

Others are worried about what negative effects these new tools might have in the long term, that is, if they will really just be decommissioned once the health crisis is over.

But for now, different implementations of snooping apps and techniques have become the new normal for millions across the world, just like social distancing and wearing masks in public.

Original post:
Surveillance is going viral - Reclaim The Net

By Emilly Comfort Maractho

Throughout this lockdown period, there was increased online discussion about the future of journalism after Covid-19. Many of them could cause a general loss of appetite.

To launch the 2020 Press Freedom Index report, Reporters Without Boarders (RSF) hosted a virtual conference on April 21, that they titled: Journalism in Crisis: A Decisive Decade.

The impressive list of five speakers included Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economics prize laureate; Edward Snowden, president of Freedom of the Press Foundation; Christopher Deloire, secretary general of RSF; Rana Ayub, journalist and Global Opinion writer at the Washington Post; and Maria Ressa, a journalist and author.

Despite persistent prediction of doom for journalism as we know it, many young people are attracted to it. At Uganda Christian University alone, we grapple with high demand. At any one time, the Faculty of Journalism, Media and Communication has about 500 students pursuing journalism and communication at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Many other institutions are training a good number. This interest also demonstrates confidence of parents in the industry.

If there was ever a time to say there is enough army of journalists to do a great job reporting news and media to have quality content, it is now. If there was ever a time that we could lay claim to professionalism in journalism and an ethical media, it would be now. The famous fish mongers who paraded as men and women of the news are, if anything, long gone-giving way for a young, smart, ambitious, tech-savvy and professionally trained lot, or at least those gifted in it. Some of them fit the bill of super journalists working across platforms.

These trained journalists would be the perfect kind of troops for what the organisers of this years Press Freedom Day usually marked on May 3 called for, journalism without fear or favour. The theme was coined before Covid-19 became the nightmare that it is, which has forced the organisers to push the official celebration to later in October.

What Covid-19 has done is to truly test the limits of those who take journalism seriously, imagining that there could be journalism without fear or favour. Predictably, the public has rushed to blame the media for the disinformation that has assaulted us. No doubt, the media is not blameless. But what if the media is not the main problem? What if the problem is those who are the custodians of the truth and a deliberate attempt to twist that truth? What happens when facts are not enough?Covid-19 unleashed a series of actions by governments across the globe. Many of them needed questioning. But we all quickly became complicit, accepting that no one had the answers, or worse still, knew the truth. All we had to do was trust science to someday find a solution, in the meantime follow the rules, not question anything. Leaders waited on science to direct them, so did journalists.As I reflected on the concept of journalism without fear or favour, I wondered if the real crisis we are having is really a crisis of journalism or crisis communication. Maybe it is a crisis of governance and the inability of leaders to ask questions and use governmental structures and resources which journalism cannot even dream of to find answers, quickly. As we ask ourselves about the future of journalism and the crisis of communication, what continues to bother me is the failure or slow pace of investigation, not just from a journalistic point of view, but from science too. It is incredible how little is coming out of the great science to dispel in a systematic way questions around the virus and to decisively deal with them. For journalism without fear or favour to happen, we have to be in position to ask great questions in order to find the right answers. In fact, we have to exercise disbelief in the known truth or facts before us. If we only license certain groups to ask questions, we shall miss the different angles needed for us to shade light on the situation in a holistic way.We have to start reflecting on what it means to say the media is doing a great job because if doing a great job is being a vessel through which official information is passed or praising the powers that be, then indeed we have a journalism crisis. We also have to reflect on what it means to pursue journalism without fear or favour, especially when fear is the weapon of control in a crisis.

As the authors of the World Press Freedom Day have noted, we need to examine the ways that new forms of control of media threaten the role of journalism in providing the public with reliable facts and inclusive views.

As we hold the media accountable, we should also address ourselves to the limitations of journalism coming from business, politics, technology platforms and the public. A crisis of journalism, if ignored, becomes that of democracy.

See original here:
Covid-19 and the limits of journalism without fear or favour - Daily Monitor

India may be the worlds largest democracy, but it also has other claims to fame: according to a recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, it is the worlds second-largest importer of arms. With its allocation for defense almost five times as much as that for health, the country also spends a significant part of its budget manufacturing as many weapons as it can domestically.

The Indian authorities transport much of this weaponry to the northern valley of Kashmir, where it is deployed on the streets against unarmed protesters demanding their right to self-determination. Indian forces have experimented on the people of Kashmir with a whole range of weapons over the years.

They have used pellet guns which they claim are nonlethal to maim and blind tens of thousands of ordinary people. They routinely fire tear gas canisters of various kinds which have, along with many other casualties, resulted in the deaths of two schoolboys after military men shot them in the head at point-blank range. Indian forces have killed thousands with the weapons they consider nonlethal and countless more with the lethal ones. All with complete impunity.

On the streets of Kashmir, the excessive use of tear gas has predictably caused grave damage to the respiratory systems of the civilian population, who find their homes engulfed in smoke and pepper gas, even with the windows closed. A paper published by Turkish researchers showed that inhaling tear gas over a period of time can have a significant harmful effect on a persons lungs. The people of Kashmir have been breathing it in for decades now.

In this place of sadness and defiance, news of the first confirmed COVID-19 case in March spread like the smoke of a tear gas canister. It stoked up panic and chaos in the immediate vicinity, while in regions further afield, people initially scoffed at those who displayed signs of alarm.

Soon, however, people stocked up on rice, pulses, and potatoes and sat inside their homes, perhaps aware that no one in power would want to save a people under occupation if the pandemic took hold, and also conscious of the shortcomings of Indias malformed health care system.

Medical experts and health organizations have insisted that in most cases, only people with an underlying medical condition succumb to the virus: hypertension, diabetes, or respiratory problems. Unfortunately, this means that the people of Kashmir are especially vulnerable to this deadly virus, because of their ruined lungs and the hypertension caused by years of conflict.

Only last year, on August 5, when Indias far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government officially (but illegally) revoked what was left of Kashmirs autonomy, it also implemented one of the longest and most rigorous clampdowns in history throughout the region. Any space for dissent was eliminated. The authorities detained thousands of activists, academics, and journalists, including even politicians who are considered apologists for the Indian government; most of them are still locked up.

They also booked tens of thousands of ordinary people under draconian laws, including children as young as nine years old, many of whom were tortured. Life as we know it, already precarious in Kashmir, came to a standstill.

The government withdrew some of the restrictions on physical movement after months of international pressure. But the constraints on mobile communication have only recently been relaxed, and internet coverage is still limited to an ancient and tortoise-paced 2G.

Even in the midst of a global medical emergency, after eight long months, the Indian state is not allowing people access to reliable high-speed internet. Because of this, doctors and medical experts in Kashmir are unable to obtain the latest information about COVID-19.

Students, who have been out of school since August 5 last year, have no facilities to study online. Working from home for professionals is out of the question. People associated with handicrafts and the tourism industry the majority of the population in Kashmir have been out of work since August, too, not merely since the start of the pandemic. They are increasingly forced to take up odd jobs to make ends meet.

The never-ending conflict has left Kashmirs health care system in ruins, if it can even be said to exist at all. At a time when the World Health Organization has been urging states to carry out tests on a grand scale, fewer than 15,000 tests had been carried out in Jammu and Kashmir by April 27, for a population of 12.5 million.

There are just ninety-seven ventilators and a handful of functioning hospitals that are ill-equipped, as patients have repeatedly complained. A senior doctor warned Al Jazeera that if the pandemic takes root in Kashmir, we will die like cattle.

To add to the crippling shortcomings of the health care system, the Indian state has threatened the doctors and health care workers in Kashmir who had spoken out against poor management and the lack of proper equipment by telling them that strict action would be taken against anyone who publicly criticizes the efforts of the authorities to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. After this statement, the state-run media interviewed doctors and health care workers on a regular basis to back up an apologetic narrative, praising the authorities for doing an excellent job.

Outside, on the streets, the Indian forces have been harassing and beating up health care workers, even though they are exempt from the lockdown. A person who was on his way home from the hospital told a national publication that he was brutally roughed up and hit on the head with a rifle butt.

Soldiers stopped a journalist who works for a local magazine at a checkpoint and demanded that he open up his bag. When he tried asking questions, the Indian soldier cut him short: This is not the virus curfew, this is our curfew.

The Indian states approach to the COVID-19 outbreak in Kashmir reeks of its imperial and militaristic attitude. Further proof of this came when it issued a new set of domicile orders, taking advantage of the pandemic and the lockdown, in the full knowledge that popular resistance in a time of emergency would be minimal.

Indian military forces have already occupied thousands of acres of land in Kashmir for decades, but the new rules make it possible for any Indian citizen to own land or acquire a much-coveted government job in the region. This poses a serious demographic threat, as the BJP and its parent organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have vowed to turn India into a Hindu nation. This act of pulling Kashmir completely under the dominance of the Indian constitution also makes the question of self-determination yet more difficult.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, the Indian state still finds the time to persecute Kashmiri journalists. Only last week, the authorities booked a female photojournalist under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) which allows the government to designate any individual as a terrorist without evidence for sharing her previously published photographs on social media.

Within twenty-four hours, police had booked two more senior journalists, also using the UAPA in one case, for equally fatuous reasons. This brazen attempt to intimidate journalists who are trying to cover the Kashmir conflict is not a new development, but the fact that those journalists are now being branded as terrorists is deeply concerning.

Even scarier, perhaps, is the way that the Indian state is exploiting this opportunity to normalize a pervasive regime of surveillance, both physical and electronic, which will remain in place even after the pandemic is over. Although surveillance has long been a major tool for perpetuating the occupation of Kashmir, the authorities are taking such measures to a qualitatively higher level, with every action of every individual now being monitored.

A senior police officer said that he felt like he was chasing a militant while tracing peoples travel histories via call records and bank transactions. This comment underlines how the Indian state is building in the phrase of Edward Snowden the architecture of oppression.

This intensified surveillance regime is just one aspect of a broader reality: the Indian state has approached the task of containing the pandemic in Kashmir as if it were a military operation. In response, people have been trying to avoid being taken by the authorities to quarantine centers.

They distrust these state-controlled centers intensely, associating them with detention camps where torture is routine. The idea of a quarantine center evokes not hope, as it should, but fear: in the minds of Kashmiri people, it looks like a jail.

Meanwhile, in faraway villages of South Kashmir, the Indian forces continue to kill rebels fighting against the state (or as the Indian media likes to put it, they eliminate terrorists). On April 12, as the world was still preoccupied with the humanitarian crisis, Indian soldiers moved into a mountain village in North Kashmir and used the poor villagers as human shields, firing at Pakistani forces across the Line of Control (LoC).

The two countries, which dont have enough face masks to contain the virus, still had the resources for an exchange of heavy artillery fire, which resulted in the death of at least four people on both sides of the border, including two children aged eight and two.

This helps the Indian state in more ways than one: as well as driving home the message to the people of Kashmir that nothing, not even a medical emergency, can prevent the state from doing what it wants to do with them, it also diverts the attention of Indias Hindu majority from the countrys collapsed health care system and an economy whose condition is even worse, toward an enemy who wants to attack us.

In spite of these horrors, the Kashmiris are holding up with a sense of harmony, perhaps rooted in years of conflict and shared suffering. Many people from different organizations as well as individuals have come forward to provide money and supplies to people who might not be able to survive the lockdown without assistance.

Such groups took the initiative to provide thousands of doctors and medical workers with personal protective equipment (PPE). The administration has rewarded these efforts with constant harassment and attempts to regulate their work.

As much of the worlds population sits with their fingers crossed, hoping for the pandemic to disappear as unexpectedly as it arrived, they at least have the luxury of thinking that once this is all over, they will again be able to walk without fear on the roads, meet their loved ones, and lead a normal life.

However, the people of Kashmir know that the current lockdown is just the latest in a long series of curfews. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic is halted and life returns to normal elsewhere, for them, life is only going to get worse.

Continue reading here:
Modi's Government Is Exploiting the Pandemic to Ramp up Repression in Kashmir - Jacobin magazine

When youre in the supermarket queue in January 2021 socially distanced from those around you by two metres and the phone in your pocket buzzes with a notification from the contact tracing app you installed six months ago, the routine will be familiar. After all, you have been through the process multiple times already.

Someone you crossed paths with last week the app doesnt tell you who has tested positive for coronavirus. It tells you to go home straight away. You must self-isolate until a test has been completed. The test, as with those before it, was automatically ordered from a public health centre as soon as notification was sent to your phone.

This is our new normal. Contact tracing apps arent here for the short-term. After the first waves of coronavirus have passed and the public inquiries into government responses have started, the apps will still be watching over us. On their current trajectory they will become essential parts of our daily lives. And it will continue to be this way until a vaccine for coronavirus arrives.

The technology, officials seem to believe, will save us. Contact tracing apps have caught the imagination of politicians looking for ways to ease lockdowns and restart failing economies. They offer hope to world leaders looking for an answer to the tricky question of when the lockdown will end. They promise a return to normality, of sorts.

From Iceland to Israel, more than 30 systems are being developed by governments and health authorities. They promise to automate the laborious process of tracking down the contacts of infected individuals, helping to slow the spread of coronavirus through the population and save lives.

Inspired by China, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, all of which have used elements of digital tracing technology, huge faith is being placed in contact tracing apps. But there is little concrete evidence that they have any measurable effect. At best, tracing apps could aid the far more effective and complex sleuthing carried out by human contact tracers. At worst, the technology could prove useless, erode fundamental human rights and usher in unprecedented mass surveillance. Much of the hype around contact tracing apps, it seems, comes from anecdotal reporting rather than hard science.

This is absolutely new ground, explains Carly Kind, the director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, which has conducted a review of how technology can be used to ease coronavirus lockdowns. This is the first major epidemic or pandemic where these kinds of contract tracing apps have been under consideration. Theres not very much evidence at all to support the sustained benefit.

But we do know that manual contact tracing itself can be effective. Singapore, a technologically advanced but authoritarian state, was one of the first countries to introduce a contact tracing app. It was initially able to contain the spread of the virus. The conclusion many have come to is wrong: the contact tracing app had little to no effect.

Far more important was the role of human-led contact tracing. Teams of people, including police officers drafted in to help with the effort, conducted interviews with people who had contracted coronavirus. They asked where they had been for the last 14 days, who they had interacted with, and trawled through CCTV footage to track movements. Once an investigation had been completed and individuals identified, they checked whether those who had been in close contact with the infected person were unwell or showing any symptoms of the coronavirus.

Everything was going pretty well when it was manual and labour intensive, but the app is not replacing conventional tracing, this is just a supplement, says Dale Fisher, a professor of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore who has been involved in the countrys response to coronavirus. He adds that contact tracing was one technique used in a wider package by Singaporean authorities. The country has also isolated its positive cases something not done by many others around the world and strictly enforced quarantines.

Taiwan has taken a similar approach, with the authorities working with telecoms companies to access phone location data. In South Korea, where manual contact tracing has also played a large part in its response, the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act gives authorities access to GPS, credit card, travel and health data.

In Asia, the data used by authorities to conduct contact tracing falls well outside of the limited remit of contact tracing apps being developed in the West. While the West focuses on using Bluetooth to track coronavirus, the success elsewhere has been based on analysing CCTV footage and phone location tracking. It doesnt necessarily follow that automated tracing, via phones, will be successful. The concern: will contact tracing apps being lauded by governments around the world end up doing more harm than good?

Getty Images / PAUL ELLIS / Contributor

Coronavirus has created a new type of surveillance. The most common type of contact tracing being developed shuns regular data collection methods a phones GPS location data or microphone to listen to surroundings for a more granular approach. Apps will largely use Bluetooth to gather details about people who are close to each other, and use these signals to create vast databases of close encounters.

This type of Bluetooth data collection, while not perfect, doesnt amass information on where people are in the world or monitor their precise movements. GPS data collection acts like a spy in your pocket, using satellite data to pinpoint your location. Bluetooth, which is a connection between nearby devices, cant tell whether youre at home or flouting lockdown regulations by gathering with friends. It merely communicates with the devices around it. Used in this way, Bluetooth gathers far less personal information than most of the apps on your phone.

For the tracking apps to work, the Bluetooth chip in any phone with it installed is essentially sending out pings while also listening for pings coming back. When one phone detects another it will record its unique identifying number against a database. Repeat this many millions of times and you can build up a fairly accurate picture of whos been near who. Get a confirmed coronavirus case and you can set in motion a chain reaction quarantines and tests.

Analysis from University of Oxford academics say manual contact tracing is too slow and cant be scaled up once an epidemic gets too big. We conclude that viral spread is too fast to be contained by manual contact tracing, but could be controlled if this process was faster, more efficient and happened at scale, the academics said.

This relies on high testing capacity being available but phone-based contact tracing could make it possible to notify tens of thousands of potentially infected people a day. If effective this would vastly reduce the amount of people interacting with others when they may be asymptomatic. Delaying contact tracing by even half a day from onset of symptoms can make the difference between epidemic control and resurgence, the researchers add.

Then there is the thorny and hugely contentious issues of where data is stored. On April 10, Apple and Google proposed a decentralised system where records of devices interacting with one another are stored on users phones. For this to work, each phone regularly downloads updated lists, allowing the system to send out alerts based on new movements and confirmed infections.

This approach stops one large database being created by health authorities or governments. Apple and Google havent committed to making their own apps, but rather have created a system that a myriad of apps can be built upon. Their system will be rolled out in mid-May. A European open-source project, DP3T, uses a similar system.

Some governments, including France and the UK, have opted to use centralised systems that dont follow the strict privacy guidelines set out by Apple and Google. (A centralised version of DP3T, called PEPP-PT also exists). This suggests that in the future officials may want their apps to collect more data than the random identifiers generated through Apple and Googles system. NHS documents show officials were considering adding the ability to send out notifications when people had been outside for too long. The NHS denies such a feature is being developed.

As a result, officials in France have called for tech firms to relax their privacy protections. Ministers have said they want to build an app that is tied to the countrys healthcare system. Apps that dont use the system developed by Apple and Google also face technical difficulties: this type of Bluetooth signal broadcasting will not work on iPhones when the app is open in the background or when the screen is locked.

Such calls for weaker privacy protections are likely to be rebuffed. If the companies were to change tact for one country, they would have to do so for all. Apple doesnt budge on its privacy red lines just ask the FBI. Meanwhile, German officials have backtracked from a centralised approach after facing a surveillance backlash from civil liberty groups and the public.

At the heart of the clash between centralised versus decentralised systems is a fundamental question: can you make contact tracing apps useful? In this nascent development community, there is a tension: do these apps produce the necessary results? Does the claim that they will help us return to some form of normality stand up? According to researchers at the KU Leuven Institute for the Future in Belgium, evidence for their effectiveness in managing disease outbreaks is limited.

Just ask Singapore. If you ask me whether any Bluetooth contact tracing system deployed or under development, anywhere in the world, is ready to replace manual contact tracing, I will say without qualification that the answer is: no, Jason Bay, a lead developer on Singapores TraceTogether app wrote in a blog post. He declined a request for an interview for this story. In the blog post, Bay argues its essential for humans to be involved in the contact tracing process due to the intensive sequence of difficult and anxiety-laden conversations" required and it would be technology triumphalism" to place too much hope in apps.

Others agree. One researcher working on the coronavirus response says its unlikely that any studies will ever be able to prove that a contact tracing app by itself has made any difference. The apps are intertwined with other response methods and it can be difficult to untangle the importance each contribution makes, they say. Similarly, officials from the Council of Europe have asked: Considering the absence of evidence of their efficacy, are the promises worth the predictable societal and legal risks?

And a team of experts from the non-profit Brookings Institution have cast doubt over how effective such apps are for individuals. Ultimately, contact tracing is a public health intervention, not an individual health one. It can reduce the spread of disease through the population, but does not confer direct protection on any individual, they argue. Officials in Belgium have ruled out using an app, preferring to focus their efforts on human contact tracers.

Another major issue for contact tracing apps is persuading people to actually use them. Academics at the University of Oxford involved in the development of the UKs contact tracing app have said 60 per cent of people would need to be using the app for it to work. These numbers are not yet being reached anywhere in the world.

Singapores TraceTogether has been downloaded by 20 per cent of the population, around 1.1 million people, and Australias has garnered more than two million downloads. Both are significant figures but not high enough to necessarily make a difference. In the US, three in five people have said they cant or wont use contact tracing apps. Oxfords analysis contradicts this: it say more than 75 per cent of people would be willing to use the apps in some countries.

None of the privacy measures or app efficacy matters if people dont download and use the apps. There is the chance that some people, including those who dont own smartphones, will be left behind. Theres a real risk that groups with low levels of trust in government are less likely to use the app, says Kind. Those same groups are the ones that are more likely to suffer from the ill effects of the illness.

Whats promoted as a panacea now could come back to bite us hard in the future. This is a slippery slope that leads to you being colour coded, says Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at Human Rights Foundation. In China thats already happened with people only being allowed to travel if their health status is listed as green, rather than amber of red. Gladstein worries that the apps could be co-opted, with officials adding more invasive features as the world goes through subsequent waves of coronavirus outbreaks.

The trade-off of using such apps is that we would, potentially, be allowed greater freedom: the freedom to go outside, to visit friends and family, to go out for dinner, to return to some form of normality. This is the issue that many tens of millions of people will grapple with in the coming months: what, really, is the price of freedom?

There are many things that could go wrong with contact tracing apps and plenty of them already have. The accuracy of Bluetooth may result in people being warned they have come into contact with people infected with coronavirus when in reality they were separated by a wall. A human contact tracer will similarly make mistakes, Bay wrote in his blog post. But the difference with humans conducting contact tracing is that they can use wider context, beyond a persons physical proximity, to determine whether there has been an exposure to coronavirus. Although as they do this, they are still recording data in some form.

Concerns have also been raised about the quality of the data collected by apps where users self-diagnose their conditions. Ultimately, people could lie in attempts to troll the system and force all of the people they have passed recently to go into quarantine. Australia has already seen one hoax related to its COVIDsafe app that has been shared hundreds of times on social media. The COVIDsafe app has detected you are now +20km from your nominated home address, the false message warned, before encouraging people to call the government to explain why they are so far from home. The scam forced the government to issue an official rebuttal.

And then theres the issue of data breaches. One proposed app that was presented to officials in the Netherlands leaked user data that belonged to another service created by the developers. Despite all these pitfalls, people are still downloading contact tracing apps in their millions. And as more are released, many million more people will follow.

But it is the long term consequences that could have a bigger impact than the short-term relief. Theres a chance that tracing apps will have health data built into them, or immunity certificates, and act as default definers of a persons status. Covid-19 is another sea change moment like 9/11 was, Gladstein says. Youre seeing a normalisation of surveillance. The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has said countries are building the architecture of oppression in response to the virus.

At the moment, coronavirus contact tracing apps are planned to be voluntary. But if theyre successful, it is not unthinkable that this could change. Each country developing a contact tracing app needs to decide what role the technology can play in their track and trace efforts.

Some apps may require people to check in with authorities to prove they are self-isolating. During his quarantine, Fisher says he was required to click on a link sent to him by the Singaporean authorities a couple of times a day. This would send back his location and confirm that people under quarantine were staying put.

An open letter from around 200 information security professionals in the UK called for safeguards to be placed on contact tracing apps. It is vital that, when we come out of the current crisis, we have not created a tool that enables data collection on the population, or on targeted sections of society, for surveillance, they wrote. In Taiwan, reports have emerged of people getting visits from the police when they have failed to report their location to authorities.

These approaches place greater importance on mass surveillance technologies. A Reuters report has found multiple surveillance technology companies, which produce the tools to hack into phones and monitor locations, have been touting their tools to governments as ways to fight the virus.

Israels spy agency had been tackling the location of the countrys infected until its Supreme Court banned the practice. The states choice to use its preventative security service for monitoring those who wish it no harm, without their consent, raises great difficulties and a suitable alternative must be found, the court ruled. The danger, privacy experts warn, is that authorities will be unwilling to give up the additional surveillance powers given to them by contact tracing apps especially if they are able to argue that the use of the technology helps keep people safe.

The mission creep has already started: politicians in Australia have been forced to bat away requests from police officials asking for any data created by its COVIDSafe app. In Canada, some coronavirus test results have been handed to the police.

Built-in legal protections are one way to avoid contact tracing apps being used to erode civil liberties. Alongside its app, Australia has published legislation that aims to protect the rights of individuals using the app. Elements of this legislation resemble a draft coronavirus safeguards bill published by Lilian Edwards, a Newcastle University Law School academic. Edwards legal protections state people should not be penalised for not having a phone, forgetting it when they go out, if the battery dies and people have the right to refuse to install tracing apps at any point in the future.

The decisions we make now, at a time of unprecedented political, economic and public health pressure, will have profound long term impacts. As with so much of our fight against coronavirus, when it comes to contact tracing apps we are flying blind. Until their use is widespread, we wont know how effective they are. And by then, it may be too late. If we allow the normalisation of mass surveillance in the name of public health it will be abused and we will regret it later, Gladstein says.

Matt Burgess is WIRED's deputy digital editor. He tweets from @mattburgess1

How did coronavirus start and what happens next?

The UK's job retention furlough scheme, explained

Can Universal Basic Income help fight coronavirus?

Best video and board games for self-isolating couples

Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn

Get The Email from WIRED, your no-nonsense briefing on all the biggest stories in technology, business and science. In your inbox every weekday at 12pm sharp.

by entering your email address, you agree to our privacy policy

Thank You. You have successfully subscribed to our newsletter. You will hear from us shortly.

Sorry, you have entered an invalid email. Please refresh and try again.

Read more:
Coronavirus contact tracing apps were meant to save us. They won't - Wired.co.uk

Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the breadth of spying at the US's National Security Agency, has warned that an uptick in surveillance amid the coronavirus crisis could lead to long-lasting effects on civil liberties.

During a video-conference interview for the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival, Snowden said that, theoretically, new powers introduced by states to combat the coronavirus outbreak could remain in place after the crisis has subsided.

Fear of the virus and its spread could mean governments "send an order to every fitness tracker that can get something like pulse or heart rate" and demand access to that data, Snowden said.

"Five years later the coronavirus is gone, this data's still available to them they start looking for new things," Snowden said. "They already know what you're looking at on the internet, they already know where your phone is moving, now they know what your heart rate is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to them?"

While no reports appear to have surfaced so far of states demanding access to health data from wearables like the Apple Watch, many countries are fast introducing new methods of surveillance to better understand and curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Numerous European countries, including Italy, the UK, and Germany, have struck deals with telecoms companies to use anonymous aggregated data to create virtual heat maps of people's movements.

Israel granted its spy services emergency powers to hack citizens' phones without a warrant. South Korea has been sending text alerts to warn people when they may have been in contact with a coronavirus patient, including personal details like age and gender. Singapore is using a smartphone app to monitor the spread of the coronavirus by tracking people who may have been exposed.

In Poland, citizens under quarantine have to download a government app that mandates they respond to periodic requests for selfies. Taiwan has introduced an "electronic fence" system that alerts the police if quarantined patients move outside their homes.

Go here to read the rest:
Edward Snowden warns coronavirus surveillance could lead to ...

According to the IbsenStage project in Oslo, the play is "more popular than ever". It is about truth, freedom and tyranny. It deals with the loner versus the group, the role of the elite and the power of the majority.

Those themes again resonate everywhere. Apparently, very few changes are needed for the text to sound 'fresh' - in the United States, in Europe, in Egypt, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe.

The main character of the play is Dr Stockmann, a doctor working in a newly developed spa in a small, poor Norwegian village.

This spa is the pride the villagers, as well as their main hope of getting out of poverty. One day Dr Stockmann discovers that the waters have been poisoned. Without telling anyone he sends samples to a laboratory.

His suspicion is soon confirmed: this water makes people sick. As a good citizen Dr Stockmann immediately warns the authorities. But the mayor of the village, who happens to be his own brother, is not very grateful.

On the contrary: he fears that if the lab results become known, the spa must close for a while. This would ruin the village. Detoxification would require investments the village doesn't have. In short, the mayor wants Dr Stockmann to remain silent and pretend all is fine.

But the doctor doesn't intend to. He writes an article for the newspaper and plans to inform villagers at a public meeting. The mayor, meanwhile, starts a smear campaign against Dr. Stockmann, putting pressure on the newspaper and others not to give him a podium.

That campaign works.

Many villagers soon believe Dr. Stockmann is a jealous schemer who discredits the spa in order to get his brother's job. The editor-in-chief reverses his decision to publish Dr Stockmann's article: "I'm not an expert. If everyone disagrees, who am I to believe you?"

The planned village meeting turns into a public tribunal with Stockmann, not the mayor, as the accused party. The doctor believed he was a hero. Instead, he's become the most hated man in the village.

During that village meeting, Dr Stockmann loses his patience. He bitterly laments the pettiness of the majority and the ignorance of the uneducated. He is an educated man, he has the facts, hasn't he?

From there all goes downhill.

The villagers get to their feet and call him "an enemy of the people". That night, the doctor's windows are smashed. He loses his job. His daughter, teacher, is also fired. He refuses to leave because "morality and justice are turned upside down".

In the last scene, Dr Stockmann declares that he is the strongest in the world, because he fights for the truth and dares to stand alone.

Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People shortly after Ghosts, a play about adultery, siphilis and hypocrisy in Norwegian society. Ghosts infuriated many. Ibsen was called "immoral" and "degenerate". This is how he got the idea to write a play about someone telling the truth and being punished for it.

In the early 1950s, the playwright Arthur Miller rediscovered An Enemy of the People. He left it intact for the most part, and just made Dr Stockmann a little more modern and sympathetic in the 1950s society would not dismiss "uneducated people" as easily as in 1882.

Miller's adaptation, which was recently republished as a paperback too, became a huge success.

No wonder: these were the days of Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunts of anyone suspected of sympathy for the Soviet Union. A perfect moment for a thorough exploration of truth and tyranny.

Yet again the balance between public health and economic loss is a major theme. It is not at all difficult to understand why the play has once more regained popularity.

The US president fires respected scientists who disagree with his own home-made assessments of the Covid-19 virus. On Monday he lashed out against newspapers on Twitter: "FAKE NEWS, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"

In Europe, too, scientific research institutes are dismissed as "left-wing" and "elitist". As soon as borders were closed in March European countries started a fight for masks.

Foreign cars are treated with suspicion. French nurses working in a German hospital near Freiburg were insulted to such an extent that one French mayor gave them explicatory signs to put on the dashboard ("Medical personnel - I am working for your health").

A bitter diplomatic fight has broken out between Budapest and Bucharest about Hungary's delivery of masks to the Hungarian minority in Romania.

Dutch and Italians are doing battle about the costs of prolonged lockdowns, with extreme generalisations flying around. A Dutch professor correcting her fellow countrymen on some points received death threats.

History never repeats itself, Voltaire once said, but the behaviour of people clearly does.

Edward Snowden and Mohammed Morsi have recently been compared with Dr Stockmann, and the mayor with Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Each performance of An Enemy of the People has its own local emphasis and raises slightly different questions.

Is someone clinging to facts and truth a naive utopian? Is the majority always wrong? The fact that questions that were topical 150 years ago come up now with the same intensity, shows that citizens fall into the same traps, over and over again.

It also shows how each generation must take very good care of democracy. And above all, protect the individual from the masses.

Here is the original post:
Some lessons from Ibsen's An Enemy of the People - EUobserver