It is no surprise that 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years: Things that used to be anonymous, private, and unnoticed are now in plain sight. Alexa eavesdrops in our homes, Google remembers our most revealing searches, and even churches are using facial recognition to find out who is sitting in the pews. We are starting to see a bigger picture of limitless monitoring: a world where the watchers never reach the point of “enough” information and instead require an ever-expanding data set about our movements, buying patterns, online activity, and workplace productivity.

But even as surveillance becomes a dominant force organizing our world, most Americans haven’t had an informed conversation about how it is changing the way we live, work, play, and even wage war. We do not yet know who benefits from all this monitoring, classifying, and archiving of our behavior. Nor have we figured out whether surveillance will really make us safer, happier, or healthier. Such questions are sometimes difficult to answer because the technology is moving so much faster than our ability to make sense of it.

In fact, Americans have complex, ambivalent feelings about surveillance. We might be excited to hear that a digital pill can tell our doctor via Bluetooth that our meds have been ingested on time, but worry what will happen once the insurance companies know the contents of our stomach. We might want a smart refrigerator to order milk when we run out, but might not want the Internet of Things to listen to everything in our “smart home,” especially when we have a family crisis unfolding, such as a teenager dealing with drug addiction or a pregnancy scare. We might like taking nature photos with our own small drone, but wince when laws don’t prevent a creepy neighbor from flying his drone over our teenager’s backyard pool party. We happily share our lives on Facebook, but are outraged when we read about their scheme to manipulate our emotions. “Now that the experiment is public,” Forbes reported, “people’s mood about the study itself would best be described as ‘disturbed.’”

Yet we often live in a kind of surveillance denial, assuming it’s not a problem if we’re not doing anything wrong, or that it’s only a concern in other countries. For instance, most Americans probably shudder when they hear about the rise of social credit scoring in China. An authoritarian government watching everything through sophisticated CCTV and online monitoring systems, then coming up with a score that could prevent someone from getting a job—it sounds like something out of a dystopian movie. But if Americans assume it can’t happen here, they’re not paying attention. Consider the potential abuses of workplace surveillance. For an increasing number of American workers, the boss can see almost everything, even if you are a freelancer working in sweatpants at the kitchen table. Productivity software can take a snapshot every 10 minutes and combine them with keystroke analysis to create a “focus score” or “intensity score” for each worker.

Yet surveillance is rarely a cost-free endeavor. We may not realize it, but surveillance changes us, sometimes subtly, more often profoundly as we try to manage the impression we make on social media or on security cameras. The ubiquitous eyes of these devices can shift the way we’re supposed to feel about a particular place (is it safe to use the retina scanner ATM?) or particular action (will they think I’m stealing?). Surveillance often adds another angle, another perspective that not everyone experiences as benign or even tolerable. Social psychologists looking at workplace surveillance have found ample evidence that even the threat of surveillance is enough to change behavior, making workers “follow rules more carefully and act more subservient,” as well as experiencing greater stress, a loss of personal control, and “a decreased sense of procedural justice.” It’s harder to work when you know a camera is perched over your shoulder and productivity software is analyzing your keystrokes for maximum efficiency. Employers might like such productivity metrics, but rarely consider the cost to workers who feel like they have no place to hide.

For many of us, surveillance forces an adjustment of our interior life, a stiffening of our feelings: Someone is watching. Better look productive. Better not arouse suspicion. In this sense, surveillance can add an emotional charge to an existing atmosphere: It may even channel our chaotic energies into officially approved channels with names like vigilance, dread, fear, relief, certainty, permanence, compliance, consumption, adding a layer of meaning to the social scene that we can feel in our gut or on the back of our neck. Especially when surveillance is focused on security, it can add the gnawing sense that “something bad happened here,” “something bad could happen here,” “someone is watching,” or even the fantasy that “someone will save me.” Privacy, on the other hand, grants us a reprieve from such anxieties and uncertainties; it gives us the gift of what one scholar calls “emotional liberty.”

If we value liberty and autonomy, we need to have a more critical conversation about surveillance technology, one that leads to smarter legal protections of our privacy and dignity both online and off. People need to be able to educate themselves and choose not only how these technologies exist in the world at large, but also how much access they have to our personal data and even our bodies.

Right now, the spread of surveillance systems has a lot of momentum, though, ironically, they have rarely faced real scrutiny. Coming on the heels of his involvement in the Edward Snowden affair, Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s former editor, wrote that “securicrats” in the United States and United Kingdom are working to “collect and store ‘all the signals all the time’—that means all digital life, including internet searches and all phone calls, texts, and emails we make and send each other.” This is the cultural logic of the present moment: making human life endlessly visible, recordable, sortable, accountable, with little regard for how this might feel to millions of people. Everything goes into the archive. No one can opt out. Nothing goes away.

Is this really what we want? As someone who has spent the last 10 years exploring this issue, I fear a fundamental human right is missing here: the right to be left alone. Too often we think of freedom in a narrow sense, that it is simply what the law allows us to do or say. But we also need freedom from the quietly oppressive forces in our world. In the case of surveillance, we need freedom from insidious kinds of supervision, coercion, expectation, and obligation, all of which are rife in a world of ubiquitous surveillance. Psychologically, emotionally, and maybe even spiritually, we need freedom from the conformist pressures of CCTV cameras, the psychological burdens of workplace monitoring, the anxiety of being scrutinized by credit card companies looking at our purchases, or simply strangers gawking at us on social media.

Must we be subjected to the constant threat of exposure and scrutiny in every part of our life? Must everything be seen, shared, and sorted? Must everything be visible on social media, CCTV, or TSA body scanner? I hope not.

And I hope we don’t shrug and simply grow accustomed to ever-increasing levels of invasiveness. Even if some aspects of surveillance culture are entertaining and even humane, from the benign side of social media to the well-intentioned camera connecting us to an elderly relative, too often we are faced with something much more controlling, if not outright manipulative. In its harsher forms, surveillance is nothing more than cold prodding to suss out our commercial prospects, to determine if we’re a potential asset or liability to some corporation, alternating with the even colder scrutiny of the state to see if we’re doing what we’re told. It’s not pleasant if you stop to consider what surveillance does to our bodies and souls, not to mention the healthy functioning of a democracy. All I’m suggesting is that we stop and think about it.

The post How Digital Technology Is Making Us Subservient, Anxious, and Uncertain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I hadn’t thought much about that moment until February 2018, when I saw all three cable channels go “live” with “breaking news” from the same spot outside the White House. As I looked at the coverage of a scene that should have seemed familiar, all I could think about was how much has changed.

In today’s tableau, the White House grounds and the streets around them were swarming with Secret Service agents, in and out of uniform, bolstered by D.C. police. What seemed like dozens of official vehicles were either on the move or parked to block any incoming traffic. A fire engine had to be stopped at a gate with an armed guard gate until a bomb-sniffing dog could clear it to go through. With President Trump and the Prime Minister of Australia inside, the White House itself was locked down.

It soon became clear that the real story was not what caused all the action but the action itself. A “female driver,” familiar to law enforcement as “mentally challenged,” had been “apprehended immediately” after her vehicle struck a concrete barrier at 17th and E Streets, on the very outside of the anti-terrorism perimeter. The threat itself was no big deal. What the anchors and experts on cable news sets were talking about was the massive security infrastructure that had been deployed against the unlikely possibility that the threat turned out to be real.

Gerry and I encountered no such obstacles on that night long ago. We were students at Sidwell Friends, the elite prep school where the Obamas would send their children in a much different era. When we went there, Sidwell was segregated, and for us white kids visiting “Negro nightclubs” in downtown D.C. was an adventure. The minimum age to drink beer in the District was 18, and we looked old enough to get served. We didn’t spend much money, but owners and patrons indulged us for reasons of their own, and we were flattered.

On that fateful evening, Gerry and I went to the Rocket Room, where the band played rhythm and blues, the comedian told dirty jokes, and the stripper was almost maternal. We had a few brews, and then walked out onto New York Avenue.

Traffic was light, it was balmy and the air smelled good. For no particular reason, we began to walk toward the White House. We probably talked about school friends, sports, and national politics, which were inescapable at Sidwell Friends. I’m sure we did not talk about our fathers. Mine was Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice. Gerry’s was Legal Advisor to the President.

It didn’t take long before those few beers asserted themselves on our bladders, and we needed a place to pee. Pennsylvania Avenue was still open to traffic in those days, and we crossed where it intersects both New York Avenue and 15th Street, creating the corner of the White House grounds. An occasional car rolled by. We were getting uncomfortable, as we proceeded down 15th and then through an open gate and on to the White House grounds. It was dark under the trees as we approached the fence that surrounded the South Lawn.

The need was urgent, and there was no point in delay. We approached the fence, unzipped, and leaned against the bars so that our streams of urine landed inside. There were no sirens, horns, or buzzers. No blazing lights or barking dogs. No shouts from uniformed guards or Secret Service agents. We walked back to the street and continued on our way.

I don’t think we were being truly rebellious. No doubt our parents would have been angry, as much about the beers and the Rocket Room as about our disrespect for presidential surroundings. Had we been stopped and identified, we probably weren’t significant enough to make The Washington Post. But the moment of teenage assertiveness was worth the risk and, after all, we needed to pee.

When we reached the sidewalk, Gerry said, “now you can tell your grandchildren you pissed on the White House lawn.” Of course, he was making a joke about false bravado in 1954. But, considering the scene played out on the cable news channels in 2018, it will take massive changes in both politics and society before anybody can ever do what we did again.

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This debate is not a new one in American history. Even before the Cold War fears of nuclear warfare, back in the 1930s and 1940s, a similar debate erupted about a different set of security fears and what was then called “home defense.”

During the Roosevelt years, liberal democracies everywhere felt threatened by the rise of the twin absolutist ideologies that were gaining ground across the globe: fascism and communism. News of atrocities committed in the name of these isms—in Ethiopia, China, Spain, the Soviet Union—frightened Americans. Many Americans wanted to join the fight against fascism overseas, while plenty of others embraced isolationism. But all feared the possibility of aerial bombings, chemical and biological weapons, and a panic that could install a dictator in the White House.

Fear-drenched messages resounded nationwide. Radio dramas such as Archibald MacLeish’s “Air Raid” featured sounds of children screaming as bombs whizzed through the air. Americans read about new “super-bombers” that soon could fly non-stop across the Atlantic and bomb U.S. cities. Theories about how we could be attacked also seeped into the culture: What if the Nazis set up bases in Iceland or Bermuda?

In January 1939, FDR said the world “has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift [that] the distant points from which attacks may be launched are completely different from what they were 20 years ago.” By the spring of 1940, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled across the French countryside, FDR declared that, in essence, isolation was a prescription for national suicide.

“Civilian Defense in Detroit.”

New Deal liberals, previously consumed with trying to expand the safety net to curb capitalism’s sharp edges, began to grapple with citizens’ obligations to democracy in times of crisis: How should civilians work with government to keep themselves and their communities safe from enemy attacks? Should Americans be militarized to prepare for war? Should individual liberties be abridged in the name of protecting America in its hour of need? How should “home defense” help keep civilians calm and maintain their morale? Finally, should home defense improve people’s lives by combatting malnutrition, poverty, joblessness, and despair?

In May 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD)—the precursor to today’s Department of Homeland Security.

There were two competing, bold, drastically distinct liberal visions for what home defense should mean in the lives of Americans. The debate set Eleanor Roosevelt’s social defense vision against New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s brand of national security liberalism. Eleanor Roosevelt was the OCD’s assistant director, the first First Lady to have an official role in an administration; La Guardia was its director while also serving as mayor.

The two of them argued over the classic trade-off between “guns” and “butter.” For La Guardia, the need was to militarize society, whereas Mrs. Roosevelt endorsed “guns” but not at the cost of sacrificing a continued focus on social programs. La Guardia and his supporters were willing to trample on civil liberties, while social defense liberals like the First Lady made more of an effort to defend individual rights and even made a stab at protecting Japanese-Americans from the racist hysteria sweeping the nation after Pearl Harbor.

The First Lady adopted a broad conception of home defense. Her vision featured a government-led and citizen-powered movement to make Americans “as much interested today in seeing [citizens] well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed, obtaining needed medical care and recreation” as in military security. She insisted that the country had to live its values. In wartime, she argued, “every place in this country must be made a better place in which to live, and therefore more worth defending.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, center, acting as assistant director of civilian defense, at a 1941 conference on “women’s activities in civilian defense.”

To Mrs. Roosevelt, World War II was not only a struggle to defeat fascism militarily. It also required a wartime New Deal to secure a better future by mounting a national effort to attack Americans’ unmet human needs.

The First Lady was charged with overseeing volunteer participation in home defense. She helped recruit more than ten million volunteers, including an estimated three million who performed some type of social defense role. Citizens working through their government fed women and children, provided medical and child care, trained defense plant workers, led salvage campaigns, improved transit systems, planted victory gardens, and helped women learn about nutritious diets. Her campaign helped make it acceptable for liberals to champion big government both in terms of military affairs and social democratic experimentation—a government devoted to both guns and butter.

La Guardia, whose New Deal partnership with FDR had modernized and humanized the nation’s most populous city, embodied the “guns” and anti-civil liberties side of the debate. He worried about social disorder. Watching Rotterdam, Paris, and London being bombed from his perch in City Hall, La Guardia thought that American cities could eventually meet the same fate. Incensed that the administration hadn’t yet established a home defense agency, the mayor lobbied the White House until FDR signed the executive order in May 1941 and tapped La Guardia to be his home defense chief.

La Guardia brandished a new form of national security liberalism that prioritized military over social defense (and individual rights) in times of crisis. Under his vision, a government-civilian partnership would militarize civilians’ lives. He proposed requiring big city workers to volunteer as firefighters and learn how to handle a chemical weapons attack. He recommended distributing gas masks to 50 million civilians, putting a mobile water pump on every city block, and establishing five volunteer fire brigades for every city brigade. A fourth military branch composed of civilians would prepare cities to endure air raids.

La Guardia relied on fear to sell his message. He could come off like Orson Welles (creator of “War of the Worlds”) on steroids. If the public was fearful, he reasoned, it would be inspired to mobilize in its own self-defense.

While he did aid FDR in sowing a war mindset and alerting Americans to the Nazi peril, he also dispensed with civic niceties and civil liberties. In contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt’s reaction to Pearl Harbor, La Guardia asked citizens to spy on other citizens, shuttered Japanese-American clubs and restaurants, called his media critics “Japs” and “friends of Japs,” and ordered Japanese-Americans confined to their homes until the government could determine “their status.”

America’s leading urban reformer pushed liberalism in a novel direction, as he fought to use the federal government to militarize civilians in order to maximize their safety. Ultimately, social defense took a backseat to military security during the Cold War. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy launched a range of domestic reforms aimed at strengthening the home front socially and economically, yet military security—loyalty oaths, nuclear arsenals, evacuation drills—typically took priority over social defense. The kind of far-reaching wartime New Deal envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt was never enacted during the Cold War. Even Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was cut short partly due to the demand for “guns” during the Vietnam War.

The trade-offs are evident even today. Liberals argue with conservatives and among themselves about the proper balance between individual freedom and national security. Equally controversial, social reforms to improve life at home are locked in conflict with steps to keep us physically safe. This is not just a question of resources. It boils down to how we see ourselves as citizens of our democracy. Some liberals, for example, argue that “nation-building right here at home,” as President Obama suggested in 2012, is as important as cracking down on suspected terrorist threats or planting democracy in the Middle East.

All of these debates are traceable to the struggle among liberals to alert citizens to the war on “two fronts”—at home and abroad—during the Roosevelt years. As long as America has enemies overseas and threats from within, the fight over the best balance between guns and butter and between military security and civil liberties will remain central to America’s national identity—an enduring legacy of the campaign by liberals such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia in World War II to liberate Americans from the grip of fear.

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In 2012, in the first Breivik v. State, he was convicted of mass murder and terrorism and sent to prison for the maximum sentence allowed under Norwegian law—21 years. But Norway is not done with him. Or, more accurately, he is not done with Norway. This time, Breivik came to court to sue the state for “violations of his human rights.”

For our own sanity, those of us living in Scandinavian countries with generally trustful relations between people and well-functioning economies and welfare states have wanted to move on from the brutality of attacks like Breivik’s. But every so often there comes an event—the bombings in Brussels this week, for example—that punctures our sense of security. For me, the return of the devil was one of them.

It is ironic that Breivik sued the Norwegian government, when families of the victims and survivors of the terrorist attacks have long considered filing their own suits against the state for failing to protect the children and more generally failing to protect its own citizens. The families of the victims have not had the energy to follow up before the courts, and they’ve been trying to get back to the lives they led before the July 22 attacks.

But certainly so many things changed with Breivik’s appearance on that clear and sunny summer day in 2011 in this otherwise fortunate corner of the world. Many people described it as a horror movie because it felt so surreal—the sight of Breivik dressed in a police uniform he tailored himself, contradicting the good intentions and camaraderie most Norwegians put their faith in, massacring the brightest of the next generation. This is why he has come to embody the devil himself here.

His actions made us realize how ill-prepared we were to deal with this type of evil. When Breivik set off the car bomb in Oslo, only four police officers—out of thousands—were on duty. In downtown Oslo, no obstacles prevented the terrorist from parking his car at the unguarded entry door to the government headquarters. He had plenty of time to drive to Utøya Island and conduct a manhunt against the children attending the Norwegian Labor Party summer camp. Neither a helicopter nor a boat could be organized in advance to stop Breivik’s massacre.

At the time of the attack, I myself was celebrating my daughter’s 13th birthday in the Swedish countryside. This peaceful scene was interrupted by a call from my editor at the Swiss Broadcasting Company, where I am the northern European correspondent. “Something strange is happening in Oslo,” she said. And then, for many weeks, I was plunged into a disturbing underworld seething with anti-government, anti-immigrant anger and violence that we hadn’t seen until it boiled over.

During the first iteration of Breivik v. State in 2012, I sat through the 10-week-long criminal proceedings at the Oslo Court. To me, his propaganda was as ridiculous as his frightening actions. Breivik said he was fighting to prevent the downfall of Western civilization at the hands of a Muslim takeover. “This country is my prison,” he said. His only regret, stated before the sentencing, was, “I did not succeed in killing even more of those people.” When Breivik got his life sentence on August 24, 2012, I felt relieved. But I did not feel relaxed; I knew that at some point he—or another kind of Breivik—would be back.

Breivik himself came back earlier than expected. His challenge against the state interested me because I think all of us, in the aftermath of his actions and sentencing, have wondered whether we have treated him according to the values we hold dear, even if his actions went beyond the limits of reason. Is it possible to deal fairly with a monster?

During the last four years, Breivik has basically been in his own prison, as he is deemed to be a danger to others and others are seen as a danger to him. A team of 49 people (including a doctor, a priest and gym coach) is taking care of him. He occupies three rooms: a sleeping room with ensuite shower, a study room with books and a typewriter (Breivik is an accredited student at Oslo University), and a private gym. Breiviks receives about 2,500 letters a year, many of them very long and requiring translation from Russian and other languages. Norwegian taxpayers have picked up the bills for damaged government ministries, new prison construction, lawyers, and translation, which have cost them more than a billion dollars so far.

To get to Skien, the former industrial hotspot that houses Breivik’s prison and the site of his most recent trial, I took a three-hour train ride from Oslo across beautiful fjords, along lakes, and through deep forests At the lower end of the famous Telemark Canal, I caught a taxi for the half-hour trip to the Skien High Security Prison. The distance from the original location of his crime felt like an important symbol to the people of Oslo: ”We keep him away from you.”

Skien Prison certainly felt like a prison: It had high walls, barbed wire, and control towers. However, there was a certain human touch to it, as all the guards I met were very friendly and welcoming. The sign outside the prison door noted it was a kriminalomsorgen, a ”care center” for criminals. After having suffered from and contributed to the extensive inhumanties of World War II, Norway developed a humane penal code, based on the idea that all wrongdoings can be corrected and every person should have a second chance for a decent life.

The prison’s sports hall had been turned into a courtroom for the four-day-proceeding. I could tell that when Breivik walked in, neatly dressed and with a fully shaved skull, he was enjoying being back in the spotlight. I found myself just a few meters behind this man, who by appearance and voice could be any person you might meet on the streets of the wealthy western parts of Oslo, where Breivik grew up. However, it soon became clear how different Breivik was from those people. He started by offering a Hitler greeting to the auditorium and then said to judge Helen Andenæs Sekulic,”I am the secretary general of the Nordic State Party.” A political party that exists only in his shaven head.

Skien Prison—a Norwegian kriminalomsorgen—converted its sports hall into a makeshift courtroom for the most recent proceedings of Breivik v. State.

In his three-hour long statement, Breivik compared himself to Hitler, Nelson Mandela, and Abraham Lincoln as “leaders who were ready for violent action when deemed necessary.” He asked the court to relax his prison regimen so he could more easily interact with fascist supporters around the world. The horror movie that unfolded after the attacks was taking a turn towards a farce. Here was a 37-year old terrorist, asking for compassion from a world he had savaged, turning the goodwill of the Norwegian people against them. And he didn’t see the irony.

But I understood more of what was at stake when I talked to the father of one of the girls killed on Utöya during a break in the trial. He, and other relatives and survivors, came because they wanted to know that they would be safe from this man.

Breivik proved to be worst witness for his own case against the Norwegian state. He verified the shocking fact that yes, there are human beings who are so inhuman that they never ever should be released again. So, when the devil himself got back into his handcuffs on day four of this trial, I was again relieved—the rule of law in Norway was working as it was supposed to. But I was also depressed because I couldn’t recognize anything familiar in this fellow human being.

I lost my way after I passed one of the exit checkpoints, ending up in the prison kitchen. There, a smiling cook offered me some fresh coffee and directions for how to get out of the prison. I was so glad to find my way back to a society where there is enough humanity and the ability to learn how to deal with the worst among us.

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It would have been understandable if the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community mosque (Ahmadiyya is an international revival movement within Islam) had responded by erecting new walls or adding security. Instead, its members decided that the vandalism was an opportunity to connect with neighbors. So the mosque held an open house. “Extremism,” the community president Jalaluddin Ahmad said in an invitation to the event, “will not scare us into locking our mosques. Rather we will open the doors wider to educate all.”

If only the rest of California were responding to this moment in the same spirit as that mosque.

So far, we Californians—from everyday citizens to our top leaders—have demonstrated an abundance of ignorance and cowardice. But if we reversed course and thought of San Bernardino as an opportunity to reach out to others, we could emerge from these terrorist attacks as a better, safer, and even richer place.

Since the attack, California has seen a surge in vandalism and threats against mosques. And we’ve seen public authorities spread fear by overreacting to threats. Last week, the Los Angeles Unified School District committed the cardinal sin of responding to terror with terror by closing all of its 900-plus schools, serving 640,000 students, because of an implausible threat that other cities were quick to dismiss. Even more shamefully, local officials, instead of acknowledging their obvious error, are still defending the closing, which is sure to undermine public confidence in official statements during real emergencies.

We’re also seeing political opportunists of both parties use the attacks to advance law enforcement agendas. Take U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s attempts to capitalize on the attacks on two fronts. First, she and others in Congress seek to force Silicon Valley to weaken the encryption that protects all of us from hacking so that law enforcement might more easily track terrorists, criminals, and missing persons. Second, she is demanding onerous new fingerprinting and visa requirements for visitors to California that will discourage foreign tourists—and hurt the millions of Californians who make their living in tourism-related businesses. In both cases, Feinstein, who has aged into a tool of the security state, effectively argues that millions of innocent people should be punished for the sins of a few terrorists.

Feinstein’s response is also a symptom of what might be diagnosed as the double fear complex: Politicians fear they might lose politically if they don’t cater to the wildest public fears of Muslims and terrorism. So we see some California Congressional Democrats joining Republicans in linking the attacks to concerns about Muslim refugees—an especially cruel and thoughtless response during the largest worldwide refugee crisis in decades.

Watching all of this is to observe Californians, in just a few short weeks, put the lie to all the values that used to define us as a state—our embrace of diversity, our welcoming stance towards outsiders of all kinds, our pride in our global connectedness, and our faith in decisions made on data and science instead of superstition and prejudice.

Stop the madness, California. Our state needs a hard and immediate U-turn, which starts with recognizing how the attacks connect California to the rest of the world. While we have always been connected by who we are—27 percent of us are foreign-born, twice the national percentage—and by our globally oriented economy, San Bernardino now connects us to people around the world as fellow victims of terrorism. We all saw the fear and horror and disruption of just one attack in one building in one small city of a state of 39 million. Imagine such scenes repeated far more often in places like Syria. How can we not respond by seeking to help our fellow victims—especially the refugees fleeing the same terror we’ve experienced?

California, more than any other place in this country, has been defined by its readiness to integrate people fleeing wars and other horrors. Most tellingly, California communities have often welcomed refugees even in the face of opposition from our leaders. Back in the 1970s, Gov. Jerry Brown was as wrong to oppose the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees here as President Reagan was a decade later to oppose the taking-in of refugees from Central American wars. Both Vietnamese and Central American arrivals have enriched California immensely. In more recent times, our state and its communities have responded to callous inaction in Washington, D.C., by giving what public services and legal status they can to undocumented immigrants and to child refugees coming over our border.

So why do we allow ourselves to be limited by the United States’ decision to accept indefensibly low numbers of refugees from Syria (just 10,000) and other theaters of American warfare? California, as a global power in its own right, would do well to set the goal of leading the world in accepting refugees.

Sweden, with fewer than 10 million citizens, has accepted 200,000 refugees in the current crisis. Germany, with 80 million citizens, has taken in approximately 800,000 this year. California leaders and citizens, as a start, should express our willingness to accommodate a number that would put us in that class—say 500,000 refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. And our demand for more refugees should also include the request that the laborious and bureaucratic process of screening refugees—it lasts two years—be expedited. We need to save as many lives as we can, as fast as we can.

Of course, Washington, not the state, makes refugee policy, as a federal matter. But a push by California to fulfill its historical role as America’s America would change the conversation nationally. And if we were to get such a number of refugees, there would be huge challenges—but also huge payoffs. Our welcoming stance would distinguish us internationally—and offer a competitive advantage over the lily-livered cowboys in Texas and 29 other states who are so consumed by fear that they’re seeking to block the arrival of even tiny numbers of refugees. It’d be much easier for California, as a generous and welcoming place, to make connections of trade and commerce to the many Muslim countries that are, despite tremendous challenges, on the path to greater wealth and democracy.

We’d also win at home, since refugees would be assets in a state that needs more people. Immigration is flat here, the birth rate is down, and our increasingly homegrown population is aging, with fewer children to support it. Refugees would provide a shot in the arm to our culture and our economy—and the human capital to make up big deficits the state faces in its number of skilled workers.

The fact that such a movement in California sounds unrealistic—I can already hear the fear-mongers accusing me of wanting to give California its own Islamic state—shows just how far down the road of unreasoning fear we’ve already gone. Let’s turn around, and send the vital and very Californian message that, in this great place, the doors are always open—and that we don’t punish the many for the heinous crimes of the few.

The post Hey, Californians<span class="colon">:</span> Let’s Side With the Refugees, Not the Terrorists appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I walk to my bus stop in Buenos Aires, I zip my purse shut and clutch it tight to my body, like a football player running toward the end zone. When I play Candy Crush on the subway, I hold my phone in a two-handed death grip, lest it be snatched away. After a girls’ night out, I ask my friend to text me when she’s safely home. On warm spring days, my car windows remain shut because robberies have been known to happen at red lights.

And those deeper down the rabbit hole consider me foolhardily naïve in my lack of precaution. I know people who drive from their guarded apartment building garage to their office parking lot, and who avoid setting foot on the street even in broad daylight. Iron bars cover many ground floor windows on Buenos Aires streets, and increasingly the next floor up, too. Barbed wire wraps around some houses’ entrances like ivy. And then there are those who move to gated communities, where they can finally leave these quotidian safety measures behind—but instead end up living in a sort of custom-designed Truman Show of safety from “others.”

But the higher the walls, the more upper-middle-class porteños seem to be afraid. How necessary are these measures, and the correlated paranoia that seems to seep into every step we take?

Latin America may include some of the most violent places in the world, but that’s hardly a homogeneous statistic that blankets the entire region. Indeed, a recently released United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report on citizen security in Latin America found that Argentina and its Southern Cone neighbors have low rates of homicide.

Argentina’s is slightly below six murders per 100,000 inhabitants—far below the epidemic rates found elsewhere in the region. Robbery rates are fairly high, though the specific statistics vary, and crime increased steadily over the past 20 years—a trendline that influences perceptions more than absolute numbers do.

According to the same report, nearly 18 percent of the Argentine population has been a victim of this type of crime, compared to 25 percent in Ecuador and nearly 11 percent in Chile. Apparently I might be robbed, but probably not killed.

It’s hard to measure personal risk in any situation, and to establish the proper equilibrium between one’s behavior and actual threats. Moreover, people’s risk tolerance, even when actual risk can be assessed, will vary from individual to individual and from society to society, taking into account such things as expectations and the surrounding context.

According to the UNDP report, Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world at 86.5 per 100,000 inhabitants, yet eight out of 10 Honduran citizens feel safe in their neighborhoods. In contrast, in Chile, which has the lowest murder rate in the region (two per 100,000 inhabitants), only seven out of 10 citizens feel safe in their neighborhood. People in Iraq apparently feel slightly safer walking home at night than people in Argentina.

The report’s authors distinguish between the objective dimension of security, related to actual crime and violence, and the subjective dimension, involving feelings of fear and vulnerability. Fear doesn’t only stem from actual crime, but also from the tenor of media coverage about it, the lack of social cohesion in some areas, and a lack of faith in the public institutions charged with ensuring personal safety.

Crime is a very real and pressing problem in Latin America, but an irrational, oversized fear of it is an equally corrosive issue. Robert Muggah, the research director of the Brazilian Igarapé Institute and a consultant for the UNDP report, told me that the mismatch between perceptions of insecurity and actual crime rates can sometimes be explained by the relative increase of crime in some countries, while areas with high murder rates can develop a sort of social tolerance for the phenomenon. The population that is most vulnerable to violent crime—poor , young men—is also the group that is least likely to report fear.

Anecdotes of fear, like a grim card collection, are traded at social gatherings nowadays: friends whose parents’ house was broken into; the friend of a friend who had a gun pointed at his mother in a restaurant; friends who were held hostage at a birthday party while their hosts were robbed; the new vogue of “entraderas,” where thieves seize the moment you open your front door to rob you. And that’s just a recent sampling.

It’s offensive to be skeptical in the face of these stories, but it’s also hard to extrapolate a broader meaning from them. Statistics are powerless in the face of the intense subjectivity of the issue of perception. Rational conversation becomes impossible amid the never-ending litany of fear.

Gabriel Kessler, who wrote a book about the feeling of insecurity in Argentina, noted that there are nearly 10 times more deaths due to improper use of medication than as a byproduct of robbery. Not to mention road accidents.

Some deaths are scarier than others, he posits, and considered less socially acceptable. For example, a recent story about the guy who lived with his mother’s cadaver tied to his kitchen table for 10 years hasn’t inspired anything other than morbid curiosity. It’s not something that the average person can identify with and fear. Rather than a concrete fear of losing material objects or being harmed, it is crime’s sheer randomness that people find so frightening, according to Kessler’s research.

Preying on fear of crime is a political opportunity as well. Opposition politicians campaign on vague “tough on crime” promises. There is perennial national debate over trying minors as adults and the right draconian sentences to deter disadvantaged youth from petty theft. The national government, for its part, has recently proposed a revised and progressive penal code that introduces social considerations into criminal law. But it’s not clear if any crime-oriented measures could ever put a dent in the perceived problem of crime.

Porteños are not alone in their feeling of insecurity: less than 44 percent of Latin Americans feel comfortable walking home at night. We remain a region obsessed with seguridad, or—to be more precise—inseguridad. Harvard Latin America scholar Jorge Domínguez has said the media’s treatment of crime and violence in the region makes it seem as if insecurity is announced on loudspeakers on every street corner. The UNDP report makes special note of the role of the media in fomenting fear, and suggests more care could be taken to avoid fanning the flames.

The Argentine media, with a strong political agenda of its own, does not lag behind its counterparts in sounding the alarm on insecurity. Crime has moved from tabloids to the covers of establishment newspapers. Television crews are stationed at crime sites and endlessly interview victims, their families, and neighbors. The evening news reports are a sickening endless loop of interviews of victims and their families. When nothing new happens, victims of previous crimes are revisited. Crime is something you are presented with all day, every day. It’s hard not to feel as if it’s just a matter of time before you yourself are the victim.

I plead personal confusion, even after reading what the experts have to say. They tell me that the hysterical narrative I’m hearing is typical of my middle-class environment, and that my rejection of the phenomenon is typical of bleeding-heart progressives.

Yet this psychological academic assessment doesn’t really clarify how scared we should be—what I should tell tourists from other cities when they ask me about staying safe in Buenos Aires, or whether I can walk home at night alone, which I stubbornly do, even when I promise my mother I’ll take a cab. And so I am stuck, with little to help me unravel whether my uneventful walk home last night was a reasonable or foolish decision to make.

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At a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, a young Congressional staffer offered the answer. He said: People think that tweeting or commenting online about the surveillance is actually doing something to hold the surveillance accountable. In other words, we’re confused about the connection between transparency and accountability. We haven’t defined the difference between using this era’s technological tools to shine a light on how government works and using this era’s technological tools to hold the government accountable.

And there’s a big difference. Young, tech-savvy people who care about Internet issues love to have hackathons and develop apps and produce investigative data visualizations in the name of transparency, but none of these fashionable things are a substitute for actual governing. And actual governing is hard to find these days. Witness Congress’ failure to pass a budget, the sequester cuts, hostage-taking tactics in the Senate, threats of government shutdown.

Whatever you think of him, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has done the service of stopping us and focusing on this point. We now know about the government surveillance, thanks to the transparency he forced upon the government. But what on Earth can we do to make sure the surveillance doesn’t violate the law and people’s rights?

All our transparency tools, it now is clear, were never civic correctives in themselves.

How did we get stuck like this? One reason is that the high-profile innovators in Internet communications produced campaign technology—not governing technology. Campaign technology—like that employed by President Obama’s re-election campaign or petition sites like Change.org—identify people, accelerate communication, and aggregate data. They are modern versions of old campaign tactics—knocking on doors, news cycle management, voter targeting. But, while the embarrassing videos circulated by campaigns, e-mail call-outs to donors, and social media shaming of opponents are effective campaign tactics, they are ineffective as tools for the hard work of making government policy.

Effective policy-making requires something different: trusted personal relationships between policymakers that lead to collaborations that benefit the public.

When you think about things this way, you understand that the problem with over-surveillance at the NSA is not about technology—it’s about a huge policy failure by the humans in Congress. Oversight of policy and agencies is the fundamental role of Congress: It is a wonky, complex, drawn-out process that requires experts, institutional memory, staff who like each other, and Members who will compromise. This work is fundamentally about human relationships, trust, and political capital—negotiating tools that can’t be developed the same way in the digital world.

We can’t bring accountability to the NSA unless we figure out how to give the whole legislative branch modern methods for policy oversight. Those modern methods can include technology, but the primary requirement is figuring out how to supply Congress with unbiased subject matter experts—not just industry lobbyists or partisan think tank analysts. Why? Because trusted and available expertise inside the process of policymaking is what is missing today.

According to calculations by the Sunlight Foundation, today’s Congress is operating with about 40 percent less staff than in 1979. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, it’s also contending with at least 800 percent more incoming communications. Yet, instead of helping Congress gain insight in new ways, instead of helping it sort and filter, curate and authenticate, technology has mostly created disorganized information overload. And the information Congress receives is often sentiment, not substance. Elected leaders should pay attention to both, but need the latter for policymaking.

The result? Congress defaults to what it knows. And that means slapping a “national security” label on policy questions that instead deserve to be treated as broad public conversations about the evolution of American democracy. This is a Congress that categorizes questions about our freedoms on the Internet as “cyber security.”

What can we do? First, recognize that Congress is an obsolete and incapacitated system, and treat it as such. Technology and transparency can help modernize our legislature, but they can’t fix the system of governance.

Activists, even tech-savvy ones, need to talk directly with Congressional members and staff at home. Hackers, you should invite your representatives to wherever you do your hacking. And then offer your skills to help them in any way possible. You may create some great data maps and visualization tools, but the real point is to make friends in Congress. There’s no substitute for repeated conversations, and long-haul engagement. In politics, relationships will leverage the technology. All technology can do is help you find one another.

Without our help and our knowledge, our elected leaders and governing institutions won’t have the bandwidth to cope with our complex world. This will be a steep climb. But, like nearly every good outcome in politics, the climb starts with an outstretched hand, not one that’s poised at a keyboard, ready to tweet.

The post Transparency Is Not Accountability appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Unfortunately, the people on the receiving end of those assurances aren’t always convinced.

Last week’s “postponement” of a state visit to Washington by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is just the latest reminder: In each of the major emerging democracies, suspicions of American intentions run deep, no matter how frequently or insistently we try to dispel them. For anyone on the alert for neo-imperial plots, Edward Snowden’s revelations of NSA surveillance activities in Brazil confirmed every suspicion of Yankees being up to no good. While Rousseff herself may have hoped to salvage the visit, the reaction among the base of her own party and members of Congress would have made going forward an act of audacious political folly, according to Brazilian commentators, whatever the strategic arguments for or against.

On the face of it, the two vibrant continental-sized republics of Brazil and the United States have much in common: a legacy of immigration, racial diversity, agricultural prowess, a popular culture venerated around the world, a tradition of global sports dominance. But the cancellation and ensuing disappointment feel all too familiar. Every American administration identifies Brazil as an obvious candidate for improved relations before a rockier reality sets in.

Countries that see themselves as leaders of their regions can often find themselves in conflict. Brazil, the only nation outside of North America and Europe with a successful manufacturer of commercial airliners, is a nascent industrial power often eager to embrace protectionist trade policies. It blocked American designs to extend NAFTA into South America (the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas), opting instead to protect the Mercosur trading bloc it dominates. As a farming superpower, Brazil bridles at what it considers the unfair advantages that American farmers get in exporting their goods. And as a leading member of the Nonaligned Movement, Brazil often joins in opposition to the U.S. agenda in institutions like the U.N. Security Council. This in turn has made Washington wary endorsing Brazil for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

As document after salacious document created a stir earlier this month, Washington insisted that Brazilians had nothing to fear from NSA activity. Yet most Brazilians had a hard time seeing how U.S. eavesdropping on the conversations of presidential advisers or hacking into supercomputers at Petrobras, the state oil company, had helped “not only to protect our nation but protect other people in the world, including Brazilians,” as John Kerry claimed on a visit to Brasilia.

Neither a subsequent meeting between the Brazilian foreign minister and National Security Adviser Susan Rice nor a pair of long conversations between the two presidents was enough to sooth Brazilian indignation. “I want to know everything they have regarding Brazil,” Dilma said. “The word ‘everything’ is very comprehensive. It means all. Every bit. In English, ‘everything.’” The White House eventually expressed “understanding” and “regret” over Brazil’s concerns, (though not over what provoked them). But there was never any chance that Obama or anyone else would order a major change to the way the U.S. intelligence community does business just to keep the visit on the schedule.

For many in Washington, the “know everything” conditions Dilma was laying out for her trip were both preposterous and presumptuous. Skeptics took it as confirmation of their view that Brazil is more interested in grandstanding than in playing a serious role on the world stage. They viewed it as one more example of Brazil’s left-wing leaders using reckless foreign-policy gestures—befriending Iran, enabling Chavista excess in Venezuela—as a means of placating domestic supporters unhappy with the government’s lack of radicalism on economic policy.

Wary Brazilians, meanwhile, took the NSA revelations as confirmation of their worst suspicions of the United States. Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held it up as yet more proof that “the rich countries are not ready to accept the rise of emerging countries” and accused the United States of “committing a crime against democracy.” Members of the PT, Dilma’s left-wing party, saw in it echoes of Brazil’s dictatorship, which jailed and tortured many PT figures (including Dilma herself) and at points received Washington’s support. Most unsettling of all may have been the snooping into Petrobras, the state-owned oil behemoth: Outlandish fears of foreign plots to steal the country’s resources—oil reserves, minerals, even trees in the Amazon—have a remarkably strong hold in Brazil.

None of this changes the fact that for all the friction, Brazil and the United States have a huge amount to gain from a good relationship—in terms of economic growth, in terms of cultural and educational exchange, in terms of regional and global politics. For Washington, Brazil’s growing middle class represents an important new market, its oil and biofuels stable sources of energy, its formula of democratic development in a large and diverse society a model we admire and want to see replicated.

Yet when it comes to capturing that potential, the old suspicions still prevail. Brazil’s desire for U.S. support for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council runs into doubts about Brasilia’s reliability. The United States’ interest in Brazilian markets runs into wariness of foreign competition. The departing American ambassador, Tom Shannon, is one of Washington’s most highly regarded diplomats and has labored valiantly to build cooperation and mutual trust through a flurry of lower-profile programs; yet he spent much of his first year in Brasilia under the shadow of Manning and WikiLeaks and leaves under the shadow of Snowden and Fantástico.

It may be true that the short-term costs of the cancellation are higher for Brazil than they are for the United States. Still, the persistence of these old suspicions, in Brazil and elsewhere, has unsettling long-term implications. We root for the “emerging democratic powers” because we hope they will become our partners in a post-American world that retains the best characteristics of American-led liberal order.

And yet: If not Brazil, if not India, if not South Africa, who will join us in working to sustain it?

The post Be Worried About Brazil’s Tantrum appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was a Lutheran pastor and underground environmental activist in the German Democratic Republic, and I was desperate to develop independent data on the health of our heavily polluted rivers and drinking water. Such research, in East Germany before 1989, was a criminal act; all environmental data was classified.

So friends of mine from the West smuggled in a mini-lab for water testing—equipment that was handed over to me in a parking lot along the transit road to West Berlin. Those parking lots were heavily monitored by the Stasi, and I was terribly scared. We had planned the transaction over the phone using a code, and it worked. There is not one line about it in my Stasi files.

It is important to remember such times, especially today when the consequences of surveillance are being debated again in Germany and around the world. We all recall the fall of 1989, when thousands of people all over the German Democratic Republic (GDR) marched from the churches to the streets and squares. They demonstrated for the daily bread of democracy, for free and fair elections, and for freedom of the press and the right of free assembly. There were no counter demonstrations. It seemed that the entire people had agreed to get rid of the dictatorship. How had a state kept this population of 17 million in check for the 40 previous years?

The answer: through surveillance, incarceration, and terror.

The wheels of terror were implanted in every brain. The moment a critical thought took shape, the wheels of terror started turning. Who would be able to hear this and make note of it? Which file would it land in? What could the consequences be, what reprisals would be taken? Could there be an impact on the children’s schooling, their apprenticeship position, their college placement? Even preschoolers and kindergarten kids had internalized that. They were trained by their parents and grandparents to differentiate between the things that were public, and thus could be talked about at school, and the things that had better never leave the house.

The guarantor for terror and order was the “Stasi,” or State Security. The “Eavesdrop and Peek,” as it was known in the vernacular, was always and everywhere. By the end, in 1989, the Stasi had 91,000 official and 174,000 non-official employees, or IMs (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter), working undercover and spying on their own people. In a village of 1,000 inhabitants, for example, 15 of them spied on the rest of them. Since nobody knew whom the Stasi had recruited, you had to be careful always, and you knew that an IM worked with you, monitored you at the village fair, shared a table with you at the local pub, or sang with you in the church choir. Hardly anything went undetected. Like a fungus, surveillance permeated all of social life in “the service of Socialism” and to protect the country from the “imperialistic class enemy.”

How much the Stasi had penetrated—and how deeply its power had been branded onto society—became apparent during the demonstrations leading to the revolution in the fall of ’89. A huge crowd of people marched through downtown Eisenach in the state of Thuringia, where I live, chanting. But the moment the train of protesters passed the headquarters of the Stasi, they fell silent. Nobody shouted anything.

Later, at another demonstration, I witnessed a worker scaling a fountain and addressing the crowd. He started out with: “My name is …”, “I live in …’’, “I work in …” By refusing to remain anonymous, by stating his name and address and workplace, he revealed, in front of everybody, that the Stasi had lost its power over him. And when the Stasi headquarters were occupied, the listening devices disarmed and turned off, and the files were secured, the curtain between the Stasi and the citizens was pushed aside, once and for all.

Before the revolution, I was seen as a threat to the regime in more than one way. Not only did I work with friends and colleagues to expose the environmental damage done by the state; I was also a member of groups supporting a free church. I even spent some time as an evangelical pastor directly on the border with West Germany and delivered sermons and speeches critical of the regime.

After the revolution, I was often asked if I was startled by what I later found in my Stasi file. No, I said, those reports didn’t shock me at all. I was rather amused by the trifles that 10 spies managed to gather about me (even as they missed our smuggling in of the mini-lab for water tests). It is with enormous gratification that I study photos, shot from a briefcase, and exact sketches of my house, explaining where my wife and I had hung quotes by the playwright Bertolt Brecht or philosopher Rosa Luxemburg, a deliberate act to criticize the regime. We must have unnerved the state. Why else all that hassle?

But the files were also startling: the Stasi not only surveyed the everyday life of citizens but also influenced biographies. In my case, the Stasi sought to document my underground political activities with the goal of gathering enough material to take me to court. But they did not wish to wait until I made a mistake worthy of prosecution. Instead, they used their snitches to plant rumors in my parish and strip me of the backing of my superiors in the church. They even tried to set an informer on my wife to destroy our marriage. Snitches provoked me, engaged me in topical conversations, and intercepted letters, thus interrupting personal contacts and indirectly influencing and manipulating my life.

At the time, we didn’t understand the scope of the Stasi’s work, but we knew they were there. I was active in an environmental group back then. We figured that an IM must have been part of the group. The Stasi was always in the room. At events, when the guests were welcomed, we cynically extended a welcome to those “who had to be here professionally.” We spoke in a more self-disciplined manner and criticized the state in a much more reasonable fashion. Before I uttered certain phrases, I made sure I was prepared to go to jail for them. Only then did I speak up. Fear led Free Speech by the nose.

We never ceased to be preoccupied with the thought of who in the group might work for the Stasi. We always made sure that the group remained small, and at times we purposely put off potential members because we didn’t trust them and had no mechanisms for screening them. We never openly accused anybody of being an IM; we feared that someone so accused would be unfairly ostracized if we were wrong. We used tricks to try to find out who might be an IM, such as deliberately launching incorrect information with the purpose of tracing it and finding out who ratted on us.

Once, at a meeting, we went through the papers and bags one attendee had left behind to see if there were any hints of spying activity, thus crossing the line ourselves. We never found out who the IMs were. Our suspicions were almost always wrong. To this day, when I run into people, I feel sorry that I suspected them of being an IM and treated them with distrust and coldness.

The distrust lingers because there has been no real accounting between victims and the perpetrators of surveillance, and so there can be little rebuilding of relationships. In the past 25 years, there was never a climate for an open and public appraisal. This is tragic for the victims who were betrayed by friends, neighbors, and even family members. Their old wounds continue to be reopened. Some wear their hatred like a badge of honor to this very day, categorically refusing to talk to any former functionary.

This can be unfair. Some IMs were blackmailed by the Stasi to work as informers, thus becoming victimized perpetrators. A colleague of mine was assigned to spy on me; after coming clean, he explained in a long conversation how much he himself had suffered from having to be a spy. He tried as hard as he could to avoid me so that he would not have to report on me. That doesn’t excuse the reality that he did pass on information that endangered me.

But he paid a price: he was fired and banned from the priesthood. This was over 20 years ago. Shouldn’t he have been allowed to return to his profession? What is justice? Today I feel guilty for my own role in the path his life has taken.

Too much has been left unresolved. Having worked for the Stasi does not carry a sentence or conviction. There is no indictment on behalf of the victims, and there is no defense for the culprits. Victims can’t ask questions; perpetrators seldom admit their crimes or ask for forgiveness. There is no safe or established place, such as a courtroom, for a process like this to unfold. In this matter, society has failed, allowing the poison of hatred, dispersed by the Stasi, to have its effect to this very day. It is a lesson for those in America and elsewhere who use surveillance: the damage of violating the privacy of others can linger, long after the surveillance is over.

We got rid of the dictatorship and, in the spring of 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall but prior to the reunification of Germany, lived in the best GDR ever, without a Secret Service, and with roundtable discussions, open borders, and the sensation of freedom. Freedom amounts to more than simply the liberty to consume and travel. Only when all people—without exception—can decide the direction of their own lives, without monitoring or interference of others, can a society be called truly free. Only when we all are citizens who are served by the government, and not the other way around, will the fear vanish.

The post The Wounds Left By Surveillance appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.