FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION

Excerpts from an article by Katherine Marshall, Huffington Post (reprinted according to fair use)

Venerable Algerian and United Nations diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun worries that neither world leaders nor the United Nations and national governments are facing up to the unprecedented problems the world confronts. What is sorely needed, he argues passionately, is a new, integrated, and bold approach that he terms “human security.” In a series of recent interviews, he reflected on what that means in practice, what he hopes will come next, and why spirituality, which underpins an ethical approach, belongs at the heart of global efforts. . .

Your determination created the five year Human Security Forum that meets each year at Caux, Switzerland. What did you want to accomplish?

We face deep insecurities in today’s world, but also great opportunities. Notwithstanding countless setbacks, I truly believe we are moving towards a greater sense of common purpose and solidarity as a world community. People in all walks of life know far more about what is happening and thus can be mobilized. Autocratic leaders are losing their grip. But we miss opportunities constantly, partly because attention is deflected by conflicts and crises. I feel urgently that we are at a unique point in history and simply must act with far more energy and cohesion. We must go to the root causes of the fears and apprehensions that give birth to insecurity.

Dialogue can be dismissed as simply talk yet you have dedicated much of your life to promoting and engaging in dialogue. How did you start?

When I was very young, tensions were everywhere in Algeria, my home. Even children in different neighborhoods fought over territory. Some instinct and drive made me a peacemaker then and ever since. I refuse to be a hostage to insecurity. I experienced insecurity personally: torture and prison, and that deepened my conviction that only by talking to one another can we have lasting solutions. From the 1960s when my job was to help sort out boundary disputes among Africa’s newly independent countries to today, there is simply no alternative to dialogue. . .

What has the Caux Forum achieved since its launch in 2008?

The Forum has produced a deep analysis of the diverse and complex dimensions of human insecurity. There are five pillars, five priorities: Healing Memory, thus overcoming the mistrust created by the wounds of history; Just Governance, to work for integrity, transparency and justice worldwide; Living Sustainably, which calls us to move towards greener economies and lifestyles; Inclusive Economics, to create a global economy that benefits everyone and Intercultural Dialogue, that works for peace and physical security. Such a joint intellectual and practical appreciation is what has been missing.

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Where in the world can we find good leadership today?

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Interreligious dialogue is well and deeply established at Caux. It is a place where Muslims, Christians, Jews and people of other religions can come together and negotiate. It offers a safe place where people can build trust in one another. It offers the chance to understand what human security really means. Security is often equated purely with physical security, especially in America. The language of security is a language of power and polarization. Our central purposes is to change that language. We want instead a language of human values, a language of ethics.

I emphasize especially healing wounded memories, because they play such an important role in conflicts. For example, in Algeria and Northern Ireland feelings, the product of long conflicts and pain and violence, run so deep that special efforts are needed to heal. That is true in many places: the Balkans, Japan, Korea and Africa. We need more and better ideas.

Linking governance and security takes the Forum into new territory. What should be done?

Bad governance often causes conflict. In some areas, the way to improve governance is obvious. But what is needed most of all is more ethics. Suddenly, for example in the Arab Spring, there seems to be an emerging awareness that we need an ethical culture. The problems of endemic poverty, violations of human rights, and injustice, cry out for a deeper and more consciously ethical approach. Civil society is helping to enhance that awareness, demanding harder work and less selfishness. The past tendency was to defend one’s city, one’s nation, one’s tribe or congregation. In the Cold War where ideologies seemed clear, there were sharply defined sides. But today, with our globalized world, we need a global solidarity that includes everyone. That is truly a new demand.

What about the economic challenges that face the world?

Economics can be very divisive, as divisive as bad governance. The reality and the perception that global affairs are managed by an oligarchy, a small group of powerful people, are corrosive. Spending on the military is a scandal — USD 1.5 trillion, an unimaginable sum, while less than U.S. $100 billion is spent on development. We spend 15 times more to kill each other than to heal. We must correct that. The sources of tension are obvious in trade patterns, again where oligarchies dominate. The U.S. subsidies for cotton are just one example of what are evident and very visible injustices.

The infamous “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington spoke about is often misread, in Washington, as a clash of religions. It is not one religion, or language, or ethnic group or class against another. It is a clash of ethics. In Somalia, the clash is not about religion — the people share a common religion, language and ethnicity, yet they are plagued by conflict, as clans and families fight one another.

There can be no ethical culture without a clear and strong notion of justice. All people feel injustice. The principles of justice apply to all the issues and dimensions that we are trying to address at the Caux Forum.

To shift to an ethical culture, a true dialogue of civilizations, we need to work much more and more effectively with the media, to combat images, prejudices, and painful memories. We need to do more with Parliamentarians. And we need to bring spiritual leaders into the discussions. Windows perhaps are open to all three, but we need to pry open the doors.

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION

A video and transcript from Democracy Now (reprinted according to terms of Creative Commons) (abridged)

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, Brazilian privacy activist David Miranda and others have launched a new campaign to establish global privacy standards. The proposed International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers would require states to ban mass data collection and implement public oversight of national security programs. The treaty would also require states to offer asylum to whistleblowers. It is being dubbed the “Snowden Treaty.” At a launch event last week, Edward Snowden spoke about the need for the treaty via teleconference from Russia. “This is not a problem exclusive to the United States or the National Security Agency or the FBI or the Department of Justice or any agency of government anywhere. This is a global problem that affects all of us,” Snowden said.

Video of Snowden, Greenwald and Miranda

TRANSCRIPT

EDWARD SNOWDEN: We’ve already changed culture. We can discuss things now that five years back, if you had brought them up in a serious conversation, would have gotten you sort of labelled as a conspiracy theorist or someone who really was a—was not really thinking about what governments reasonably are likely to do. Now, the danger of this is that we’re always living in a circumstance where governments go a little bit further than what any public would approve of if we knew the full details of government.

Now that we’ve established at least the bare facts of what’s going on in the arena of our basic liberties, what happens as we transit through a city, as we talk to our friends, as we we engage with family, as we browse books online, all of these things are being tracked, they’re being intercepted, they’re being recorded. They’re being indexed into a sort of surveillance time machine that allows institutions that hold great powers, whether they are public institutions, whether they’re private institutions, such as corporations—they’re empowering themselves at the expense of the public.

Now, we’re beginning to shift from that cultural, necessary change, where we brought awareness of what’s really happening, into a point where we need to think about what the actual proposals that we’re going to put forth are going to be. We need to change not just the facts that we’re aware of, but the facts of the policies that we’re going to live under. And some people would be encouraged, saying we’ve made improvements. There have been the first and most important legal reforms in the surveillance arena domestically within the United States passed in nearly 40 years. But if you ask anyone who studies the actual legislation, they’ll agree that they’re a first step. They don’t go anywhere near far enough.

And as was just mentioned, we see that in many countries around the world governments are aggressively pressing for more power, more authority, more surveillance rather than less. And this is not just in foreign states. This is not just in what we would consider traditional adversary states such as, you know, Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, whoever you’re really afraid of. It’s not just people who are different from us. This has happened in Australia, where they now have mandatory retention of everyone’s data without regard to whether they’re involved in any sort of criminal activity or if they’ve even fallen under any sort of criminal suspicion. We see the same proposals put forth and adopted in Canada. We see the same thing occurring in the United Kingdom. We’ve seen the same thing pass in France.

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Free flow of information, How is it important for a culture of peace?

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And what’s extraordinary about this is that, in every case, these policy proposals that work against the public are being billed as public safety programs. But when we look at the facts, for example, in the United States, even if you’re not aware of or you don’t believe the reports that have been shown in the newspaper based on classified documents that show governments are engaging in the broad, massive and indiscriminate collection of data on every citizen’s lives, you can see that governments have confirmed things, they’ve declassified them through their own documents, and they’ve done investigations to discover: Are these programs, now that they’ve been declassified, now that we can discuss them, are they really valuable? Do they really keep us safe?

And despite two independent investigations appointed by the White House, that are, again, allies of these institutions and have every incentive to sort of whitewash these programs and say they’re wonderful, have in fact said that upon—upon reviewing all available evidence, even classified evidence, after interviewing the directors of the National Security Agency and so on and so forth, they’ve seen that these programs actually don’t save lives. Mass surveillance, by their own quotes, has never made a concrete difference in a single terrorism investigation in the United States.

There was one case where the mass surveillance of everyone’s phone records in the United States of America showed that there was a single cab driver in California wiring money back to his clan in Somalia that did have some ties to terrorism, but even in that case, the government said they could have achieved—and they would have achieved—the same evidentiary gain through traditional targeted means of investigation. They said they were already closing in on this individual.

And so, this raises the question: Why are programs being billed as public safety programs when they have no corresponding public safety benefit? And the unfortunate reality is that while these programs do have value—you know, the government is not doing this for absolutely no reason—the value that they have is based on intelligence collection. It’s based on adversarial competition between states that’s happening secretly. It’s happening without any form of robust oversight. It’s happening without the involvement of real open courts with an adversarial process.

And increasingly, we’re seeing that even if these programs are instituted with the best of intentions—to keep citizens safe, to assist in war zone operations, in the intervention of terrorism in certain spaces around the United States and throughout the world—inevitably they come back to impact us here at home. The same programs that the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency collaborated on in areas like Yemen are now being used by the United States Marshals Service in the United States against common criminals, people who do not represent any real threat to public safety in a manner that would justify in any way the intrusion into and the violation of millions and millions of citizens’ rights—and noncitizens.

And unfortunately, this trend is continuing. If you open The Washington Post just today, you’ll see that the Obama administration was secretly exploring new ways to bypass the technological protections of our privacy in the devices that surround us every day. Now, this is what we confront today. This is not a problem exclusive to the United States or the National Security Agency or the FBI or the Department of Justice or any agency of government anywhere. This is a global problem that affects all of us. What’s happening here happens in France, it happens in the U.K., it happens in every country, in every place, to every person. And what we have to do is we have to have a discussion. We have to come forward with proposals, to go, “How do we assert what our rights are, traditionally and digitally, and ensure that we not just can enjoy them, but we can protect them, we can rely upon them, and we can count on our representatives of government to defend these rights rather than working against them?”

And with that, I’ll turn it over to David Miranda. Thank you very much for the invitation to speak.

For transcript of Miranda and Greenwald, click here.