Orangutans on the Planet of the Chimpanzees

These are some comments I posted on Facebook in November 2016. I had previously talked about these ideas in a podcast and I have since written and talked extensively about them, but this was my first attempt at summarizing them in writing. The original links are broken, so I'm republishing the texts here for future reference, including some comments by others to whom I was replying.

PB: Why is the idea that people should be left free to lead their lives as they see fit, as long as they don’t harm others, so provocative?

Because humans are social animals, descended from chimpanzee-like apes. For such animals the community they live in is everything, hierarchy is paramount and obedience to alpha individuals is not only instinctual but an actual biological need, without which individuals become confused and unhappy. For a chimpanzee, personal territory or property means very little. Far more important is determining one’s place in the hierarchy and being receptive to those above oneself in the pecking order. The other side of this coin is the importance of making sure that everyone else respects the primacy of the group and the hierarchy, in particular putting those with lower rank in their places. Chimpanzees become nervous, agitated and aggressive when someone acts outside these bounds.

Note that this is not the case with all apes. Orangutans are mostly solitary and highly territorial. For them, hierarchy is non-existent or peripheral while territory is central. The most important thing for an orangutan is to delimit and defend a piece of the forest and males even undergo an extensive physiological and hormonal transformation if/when they achieve this (about half of them do and this is why some but not all orangutans have flanges protruding from their faces, they grow out as part of a second puberty of sorts once they manage to defend a piece a territory for an extended time). Orangutans meet to mate but then split up with females rearing children and males going off to find new mates to impregnate using one of two mating strategies. Flanged males attract females to mate with by defending territory (“call-and-wait”) while non-flanged males seek out females and force mating (“sneak-and-rape”).

Humans seem to have the capacity for both sociocentric and territorial behavior. More specifically most people seem to be highly sociocentric while a small minority is also somewhat territorial. So here is the answer to your question: To most people, living as they see fit to a large extent involves controlling others through participating in hierarchical behavior and aggression. For this reason, to say that people are allowed to do anything they want except intervening in the business of others is a bit like saying they can do whatever they want except eating and having babies. It makes perfect sense to an orangutan but no sense at all to a chimpanzee. In other words, the reason that people want to control others is not only rent-seeking, although that is of course a big factor. Another important reason is that controlling others by participating in flock behavior is an instinct and a biological need.

I think this is somewhat parallel to your own pet peeve that poverty, not wealth, is the default, so we should not look for the causes of poverty but rather for the causes of wealth. Similarly, social and hierarchical behavior is the default for chimp-like apes like humans. The interesting question in my mind is rather why a few humans seem drawn to a solitary-territorial behavioral pattern. My best guess is that this is simply a continuum of possibilities, like many other characteristics among all kinds of animals. Perhaps there is also some actual chimpanzees with orangutan-like behaviors – perhaps alpha individuals can be described this way or perhaps just odd ones who are eventually eliminated from groups when they do not behave like proper chimps. Human history indicates that those who are not inclined to conform to groups and hierarchies usually become highly unpopular, are often persecuted etc.

So the problem that libertarianism tries to solve might be a problem of the libertarians themselves and their peculiar personalities. Perhaps libertarians are orangutans in a chimpanzee world. To me this actually seems like the most plausible basic explanation and from this perspective the reasonable solution can hardly be to force chimpanzees to live like orangutans – which demanding they leave others alone would amount to – but rather for those of us who are more orangutan-like to go off in the forest, stake out territories of our own and live as we please with others who have a similar disposition. In other words I am an 100% exit, 0% voice type of guy when it comes to politics and strategy, since I do not believe that most people are biologically suited to a libertarian way of life. The solution is to have sociocentric (democratic/communist) societies on some parts of the planet and territorial (libertarian/capitalistic) societies on other parts of the planet. Since sociocentrics are far more numerous than territorials, the only way for the two groups to live side by side while upholding respect for territory/property would probably be if territorials took charge and implemented a rather authoritarian type of rule which the sociocentrics were not able to resist, e.g. defeating all attempts to implement majority rule with overwhelming military force.

DB: That was the most interesting thing I have read for quite some time! This could be empirically investigated. How are the social/territorial traits distributed in and between sexes, races, cultures? How heritable are they? Is this a stable personality trait or does it change during life

Another important question is how Western civilization came to have somewhat territorial leaning institutions and how they survived for hundreds of years. This knowledge could be used to nudge the world in the happy and prosperous direction you envision.

Territorial societies, being much more economically prosperous, can defend themselves from military aggression from sociocentric societies. The hard part is to keep the territorial societies territorial and, if that is successful, for the territorials to refrain from too badly colonizing the sociocentrics. I guess we need free flow of people between the two types of society to allow everyone to go where they fit in and thus prevent social pressures from building up in either of them.

How the West became relatively territorial is a very interesting and important question but I am afraid that I do not have a solid theory about this. One could point to e.g. classical liberalism but while correct in itself, this would perhaps be too superficial since we then need to explain why such an ideology gained influence here and nowhere else.

As one possible starting point I would point to Christianity being a rather unusual religion, in many ways turning away from sociocentric tribalism and toward individualism and territoriality. At the very least I think Christianity must be said to be much more compatible with territorial morality than most other religions and certainly the decline of Christianity has come hand in hand with the reemergence of sociocentric morality.

Religion in general can be viewed as a check on or countermeasure against sociocentrism since it represents something absolute and thus independent of local group dynamics. Once religion became marginalized, there was – as it was from the beginning – no point of reference for morality beyond group loyalty. With secularism people went back to worshiping the collective, although in modern forms such as the cult of Humanity rather than traditional tribal allegiances. We are now admonished to see the whole of the human species as one enormous tribe and to a large extent the psychological mechanisms behind this are probably the same as in a band of hunter-gatherers.

I would also guess that Europe being split into hundreds of different states fostered a consciousness of territoriality and competition and the same can perhaps be said for feudalism in general. Later on the industrial revolution probably played an important role with entrepreneurs taking center stage and for a couple of hundred years the general trend was to allow exceptional individuals to build companies which can be seen as a new and very powerful form of territory. Of course, that was a long time ago. Beginning in 1789 at the latest, the trend has been the opposite and from 1914 onwards the human species seemingly went all-in on eliminating all remaining traces of territorialism, except a small band of orang… libertarians but we are obviously a highly marginalized group despite being able to make a very strong intellectual case for our position.

Regarding your last comment, about free flow of people, I would not consider this realistic. Relocating to a different place or becoming a member of a new group which conforms with your personal preferences is another thing that seems natural to some, myself included, but deeply unnatural and unpleasant to most. In particular, I do not think sociocentrics can be expected to move. Thus my focus on the territorials and getting them to take matters in their own hands, depend as little as possible on the non-likeminded and put as much distance between themselves and sociocentrics as possible. Colonizing another planet sounds a lot more reassuring than having our own country on the same continent as democratic or socialist states.

However, a related problem is that even if territoriality is hereditary to some extent, it is such a rare phenomenon in its purer forms that most children of territorials would probably be largely sociocentric. You can compare this to a community of people with very high IQs – if you gather the smartest people to start such a group it might be smooth sailing in the first generation but their children, although smarter than average, would not be nearly as smart as their parents. A person with IQ 150 and a person with IQ 160 can not be expected to have a child with IQ 155, but rather perhaps 120 or 130. Much higher than average but not even close to their parents. I would suspect that the same is true for territoriality, but on the other hand there is some historical evidence that e.g. aristocratic and royal families have been able to keep a territorial outlook going for many generations.

DB: Christianity did indeed make a radical break from the prevailing tribalism but, it seems to me, towards universalism/globalism/humanism rather than individualism. Both its scriptures and most of its incarnations emphasized obedience to authority and not upsetting the social order. Protestantism is more individualistic but that is hardly a cause of Western individualism but more likely an effect of it.

I take you point on sociocentrics being reluctant to move. How then to keep distance from them?

The rareness and insufficient heredity of territoriality is discouraging. On the other hand, we do have an existence proof a somewhat territorial society that really did make great things happen. With that to build upon, with greater knowledge and resources we could hope to do even better the second time around.

Regarding the question of authority, it is important to recongize that territoriality also depends on authority and hierarchy. The difference is that these are derived from property rights, i.e. rather than authority being based on being a superior aggressor like in a community of apes or a democratic society, it is based on lawful acquisition of property. This is central to the libertarian stance and the examples are numerous. The normal type of capitalistic businesses are neither democratic or anarchic but rather strict dictatorships, both in legal terms regarding ownership and in more practical terms regarding how a CEO runs a company, i.e. with far more wide-ranging powers than e.g. a prime minster of a country. Another example is microstates run on market-like premises, like Singapore or Liechtenstein. Especially Singapore is illuminating as an example since it is in many ways a model libertarian entity in relation to the rest of the world, but internally there are numerous harsh regulations. I think this would be the case with territorial societies generally, i.e. they would not be hippie-like free-for-alls but instead highly regulated – the difference being control emanating from a private ownership structure and exit being encouraged for dissenters.

Regarding the problem of distance, interference etc, I am a pessimist. I can not see a plausible way forward to create territorial societies in our lifetime, not even with scenarios like space colonization. What I aim for personally and advocate in various context is to implement personal decentralization and this can take many forms. The cost is naturally not zero but it is perfectly possible to “live outside the system” while sharing territory with current nation states. One might have to move to a different country, have multiple residencies, create intricate corporate structures etc to circumvent interference and surveillance, but in my view it is the best we can aim for at the moment and for those who have the stomach for it, it is a lot better than living on the standard terms. So I would suggest that those who are interested in truly living free rather than just talking about freedom in the abstract dispose of all ambitions to affect political change, create new countries etc and instead build small enclaves which co-exist as harmoniously as possible with local communities but have as little as possible to do with local governments.

Övervakning inte bara vid gränserna?

Det har hittills sagts att staten bara övervakar datatrafik när den passerar landets gränser. Detta håller nu på att luckras upp, vilket vi har kunnat läsa om de senaste dagarna:

Internetleverantören Bahnhof har varit ledande i motståndet mot övervakning sedan det tidiga 90-talet. Idag slog de larm i ett mail till sina kunder att de inte kan garantera säkerheten för vissa kunder just p.g.a. stadsnäten. De lovar också att snart publicera en lista över alla stadsnät som berörs av detta, och i vanlig Bahnhof-ordning kampanja och bilda opinion mot övervakningen:

"Problemet är de så kallade öppna stadsnäten, där nätägaren kontrollerar de sista kablarna fram till ditt bredbandsuttag. Det har kommit till vår kännedom att vissa av dessa stadsnät i Sverige är anslutna till Maintrac – det företag i Linköping som pekats ut i nyheterna som en bas för övervakning och avlyssning.

Det innebär att vissa av vår kunder riskerar en avlyssning av IP-nummer i "slutsteget" av nätet på vägen till fastigheten och bredbandsuttaget. (När Bahnhof dragit fibern hela vägen fram, vilket är fallet med många bostadsrättsföreningar och företag, finns ingen sådan risk.)

Vi kommer inom kort att lista de stadsnät som är anslutna till Maintrac på vår hemsida. [...] Vi ska ruska om respektive stadsnät för att få dem att inse det vansinniga i denna typ av registrering. [...] Vi kommer att ge alla möjlighet att själva kontakta stadsnäten och ge sina synpunkter. Detta gäller ju inte bara Bahnhofs kunder utan samtliga i de berörda stadsnäten."

Modern day political prisoners

Here is a list of political activists who have been imprisoned and/or seriously harassed by governments for speaking truth to power. The list is, of course, far from complete. These are just the ones I know about from the top of my head. Some people still think that we live in a free society under the rule of law. This post is an attempt to wake these people up.

  • While not technically a prisoner at the moment, Edward Snowden would be one if the US government had its way. His crime, of course, is telling the truth about abuse of state power. However, as Snowden himself points out, telling the truth is not a crime.

    If you know about additional political prisoners or activists being persecuted by governments, send me an email and I will add them to the list!

    Casual Activism in the Apple Store

    Today I discovered a new form of casual activism. Was waiting for a friend in a shopping mall and decided to go into the nearby Apple store to browse some news on one of their iPads. I then got the idea to go around to every demo device in the store, opening the browser and typing the URLs of various alternative media sites. When my friend arrived, almost every iPad, MacBook etc was displaying stuff like Zero Hedge, Drudge Report, Infowars, Cornucopia, Reason, Strike the Root and others. As I was leaving the store I saw a man scrolling on the infowars.com iPad with a fascinated look in his eyes.

    The Importance of the Individual

    Earlier tonight, I read a post on Facebook (non-public link) by fellow libertarian Robert Sundström which contained, among others, the following sentences:

    The individual is without doubt the most important entity in society. Only the individual think, reason and act. Only it know how to satisfy its wants. [...] A group of individuals are nothing but equal potential to spontaneous order and imminent chaos - depending on the formalization of the structure. There is nothing special about it - not even when it comes to an outcome of a democratic process.

    This was said in the context of economic theory, where it is not unreasonable, but it inspired me to write a few paragraphs about a wider point that I have thought long and hard about. As I perceive it, statements of this type are often made as a kind of libertarian dogma, being applied far beyond the realm of economics. I am not accusing Robert of this, only thanking him for stimulating me to think and write.

    In any case, the status of the individual is a core issue for libertarianism and I think many libertarians need to think more carefully about it. Here is what I wrote about it in a comment:

    Individuals are almost completely defined by the groups they come from. Just think of language, religion, all kinds of values and other customs. These things play a much bigger part in defining who you are, than your individual personality traits or even your individual actions. For example, if you had grown up in the country-side in Afghanistan, you would almost certainly be a hard-core muslim. Your individual capacity to reason about such things and come to your own conclusions amounts to almost nothing if the comparison is between cultures, rather than between individuals within a single culture.

    Human beings are flock animals, like chimpanzees. Not solitary animals, like orangutans. We are biologically hard-wired to live in symbiosis with with a small group. To say that there is "nothing special" about such groups is profoundly unrealistic. So speaking from biological facts, rather than romantic ideals, the flock/tribe/village/community is the most important entity in society. Individuals are secondary, since they are basically extensions of these groups. I also think it more realistic to consider the community to be the proper level of autonomy, rather than the individual, since communities are the only entities that are actually capable of long-term self-determination.

    (Incidentally, this solves a number of common problems associated with libertarianism. For example, what about the individual rights of children? That question is based on a false premise - the much more important issue is the autonomy of the groups children grow up in.)

    In my view, the root of almost all societal problems, not least things like over-sized governments, is the destruction of organic communities. The reason people are dependent on the state is that they do not have local communities to support them, which was the way things worked for tens of thousands of years until the process of civilization gradually shifted the dependency from organic communities to governments. Conversely, the only way to decrease dependence on government is to recreate local communities. It is simply not an alternative for everyone to create their own lives according to their individual preferences, because again, if you are even able to reason about such things, e.g. if you can use a language, you are already created in the image of some group.

    Libertarians open themselves up for ridicule when they focus too much on the individual, because everyone else is very aware of the degree to which everyone is dependent on social factors. Instead, we should focus on changing which kinds of groups are considered important. Instead of identifying with nations, we should try to form natural-sized communities (30-100 individuals perhaps) which function so well that the government becomes redundant. Without such communities, removing the state from the equation might even be very dangerous, which is why I have stopped arguing for abolishing the government, to instead focus on building a good community around myself.

    In answer to this comment, I got the question whether or not individuals are to be considered as insignificant, due to their biological hard-wiring, and the objection that the human mind is adaptive and can break out of specific influences. This is an additional comment I made with regard to this:

    That the individual is not the most important entity in society does not mean that individuals are not important, and indeed, most great leaps forward seem to spring from the minds of individual people. But note that progress can only happen if the ideas of a great individual takes root in a well-functioning group, i.e. when a community starts pursuing the ideas together.

    A point I was trying to make is that your ability to "break out from specific influences" is very limited, since all your ideas, even about the concepts of influence, breaking out etc is very tightly connected to what culture you grew up in. Sure, you can change many details, but you will have no desire to change many of the big things, since you have taken them for granted since birth. Do you think you would be able to become a libertarian if you were born in a small Afghani village or in a stone-age tribe?

    Hacktivist attack against Obamacare

    Just as I was finishing up my previous post, about the seeming self-sabotage involved in the development of the Obamacare website, this interesting piece of news turned up in my feed:

    Denial-of-service tool targeting Healthcare.gov site discovered

    Here is the message from the supposed hacktivists:

    Destroy Obama Care.

    This program continually displays alternate page of the ObamaCare website. It has no virus, trojans, worms, or cookies.

    The purpose is to overload the ObamaCare website, to deny service to users and perhaps overload and crash the system.

    You can open as many copies of this program as you want. Each copy opens multiple links to the site.

    ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people. We HAVE the right to CIVIL disobedience.

    Perhaps it is just the coincidence with the other blog post (which I started writing yesterday), but I feel a bit skeptical here. First of all, this is not a serious threat on a technical level (see the article for details), but rather a symbolic action of some kind. The note strikes me as odd, not the kind of thing I would expect either from hacker types or constitutionalist activist types. I generally appreciate this kind of civil disobedience, but given the ineffectiveness of the attack itself, I wonder if this does not play into the hands of the White House, which is already building a narrative where threats of external sabotage is used to explain the failed website launch.

    Obamacare - Incompetence or Sabotage?

    Government IT is hard. I say this from experience, being an IT contractor with government agencies on the client list. Big IT projects failing is if course a sign of incompetence, but not necessarily of any extreme variety. However, now that more details are coming out about the fiasco of HealthCare.gov, the online interface of Obamacare, I think the problems we are hearing about goes beyond the usual. In this article from the Washington Post we supposedly get some additional inside information, and some of it is fascinating:

    [...] the president emphasized the exchange’s central importance during regular staff meetings to monitor progress. No matter which aspects of the sprawling law had been that day’s focus, the official said, Obama invariably ended the meeting the same way: “All of that is well and good, but if the Web site doesn’t work, nothing else matters.

    So it seems that Obama had the right kind of focus for a long time, at least since one and a half years ago. How then could things go so wrong, despite the best of intentions? Here are some clues:

    “They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” said David Cutler, a Harvard professor and health adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign

    Inside the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the main agency responsible for the exchanges, there was no single administrator whose full-time job was to manage the project.

    The Medicaid center’s chief operating officer, a longtime career staffer named Michelle Snyder, nominally oversaw the various pieces, but, as one former administration official put it: “Implementing the exchange was one of 39 things she did. There wasn’t a person who said, ‘My job is the seamless implementation of the Affordable Care Act.’ ”

    But the problem was not only neglecting to put a proper management structure in place. There was also direct interference to block critical parts of the projects. Here is one example out of several mentioned:

    According to two former officials, CMS staff members struggled at “multiple meetings” during the spring of 2011 to persuade White House officials for permission to publish diagrams known as “concepts of operation,” which they believed were necessary to show states what a federal exchange would look like. The two officials said the White House was reluctant because the diagrams were complex, and they feared that the Republicans might reprise a tactic from the 1990s of then-Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who mockingly brandished intricate charts created by a task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton.

    In the end, the White House did not allow the diagrams to be published. Ostensibly, they were protecting the project against potential sabotage, but what they were in fact doing, time after time, was sabotaging the project themselves!

    Finally, being a software contractor, this makes my stomach churn:

    CGI was issuing warnings of its own. On Aug. 17, about six weeks before the launch date, a company employee sent an e-mail to a CMS staffer — with copies to more than a dozen other CMS staff members — detailing an “updated schedule” for work on the exchange. The e-mail, obtained by The Post, said that, for the tasks that CGI was responsible for, the exchange was 55 percent complete.

    Note carefully what is actually being said here: Less than two months before release date, the contractor reported being barely more than half-way done. If this was indeed the case, standing by the original release date was madness.

    These anecdotes are line with many other stories from inside the Obama administration - the environment seems to be one of paranoia and insularity. The president has a few advisors that he places an enormous amount of trust in, and these people are the only ones who get to run things, regardless of what skills are needed. t is amazing and somewhat frightening that Obama and his staff could not break out of their bunker mentality even when their greatest signature achievement was at stake. If they act with such recklessness when their own core interests are at stake, how could we possibly trust them to look out for ours?

    Some have suggested that the whole Obamacare project might have been designed to fail. I don't buy it, since I think lack of competence is a sufficient explanation, but I see where they are coming from. And I think some of these actions are clear examples of self-sabotage, intentional or not.

    Deep Packet Inspection as a Service

    Deep packet inspection is an advanced method used, among other things, for monitoring data traffic. A strength of this technique is that it enables secret monitoring, since it operates at the network level. In a nutshell, a network operator grabs each packet of data sent, does what it wants with it and then sends it along on its way. To the intended recipient it looks exactly like a normal transfer.

    TeliaSonera is the largest telecom operator in Sweden and Finland. The company was created by merging two former state monopolies and is now notorious for providing surveillance technology to foreign states with dictatorial regimes. The company has a page on its website about "Freedom and expression and privacy" where we find these rather vague sentences about customer privacy:

    Much of the business of our sector in general is built upon the collection of data about individuals and their communication. [...] In this context, there are technological trends that pose challenges to all kinds of players in the field of ICT, including TeliaSonera. [...] These trends are such as; virtual networks and software available remotely for access by users (the ‘cloud’), behavioral advertising, examination of a data of a computer’s network enabling for instance, network management, security and data mining (‘deep packet inspection’), location awareness and the risk that seemingly anonymous data can be re-identified. [...] We are committed to protect and safeguard our customer’s privacy.

    Did you notice the words "deep packet inspection"? Did you interpret that as a commitment from TeliaSonera to protect their customers from this type of monitoring? Think again. Deep packet inspection is actually a service being sold by TeliaSonera to their ISP customers. It is an optional feature that an ISP can buy to increase their control over what traffic is allowed to the end customer.

    If you have been following recent events, this should not surprise you. But perhaps it would interest you to see an example of how TeliaSonera markets this technology to their corporate customers. Of course, as always when new methods of Internet control is rolled out, it is sanctified in the name of protecting children. When it comes down to it, what they are selling is, in the exact words of TeliaSonera:

    a technical solution combining intelligent routing with deep packet inspection in order to deny access to URLs

     Here is the original document:

    Snowden: A Manifesto for the Truth

    This article by Edward Snowden was published today in Der Spiegel. Since I could not find a translation online, I decided to publish one (suggestions for improvements are welcome). I previously published the full text in German.

    In a very short time, the world has learned much about unaccountable secret agencies and about sometimes illegal surveillance programs. Sometimes the agencies even deliberately try to hide their surveillance from high officials and the public. While the NSA and GCHQ seem to be the worst offenders - this is what the currently available documents suggest - we must not forget that mass surveillance is a global problem in need of global solutions.

    Such programs are not only a threat to privacy, they also threaten freedom of speech and open societies. The existence of spy technology should not determine policy. We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit monitoring programs and protect human rights.

    Society can only understand and control these problems through an open, unbiased and informed debate. At first, some governments feeling embarrassed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented campaign of persecution to supress this debate. They intimidated journalists and criminalized publishing the truth. At this point, the public was not yet able to evaluate the benefits of the revelations. They relied on their governments to decide correctly.

    Today we know that this was a mistake and that such action does not serve the public interest. The debate which they wanted to prevent will now take place in countries around the world. And instead of doing harm, the societal benefits of this new public knowledge is now clear, since reforms are now proposed in the form of increased oversight and new legislation.

    Citizens have to fight suppression of information on matters of vital public importance. To tell the truth is not a crime.

    This text was written by Edward Snowden on November 1, 2013 in Moscow. It was sent to SPIEGEL staff over an encrypted channel.

    Snowden: Ein Manifest für die Wahrheit

    This was published today by Der Spiegel. It is currently a bit tricky to get the full text, since it is behind the Spiegel paywall, and also in a very strange format. So I decided to re-publish it.

    Update: Here is the article in english translation.

    In sehr kurzer Zeit hat die Welt viel gelernt über unverantwortlich operierende Geheimdienste und über bisweilen kriminelle Überwachungsprogramme. Manchmal versuchen die Dienste sogar absichtlich zu vermeiden, dass hohe Offizielle oder die Öffentlichkeit sie kontrollieren. Während die NSA und (der britische Geheimdienst –Red.) GCHQ die schlimmsten Missetäter zu sein scheinen – so legen es die Dokumente nahe, die jetzt öffentlich sind –, dürfen wir nicht vergessen, dass Massenüberwachung ein globales Problem ist und globale Lösungen braucht.

    Solche Programme sind nicht nur eine Bedrohung der Privatsphäre, sie bedrohen auch die Meinungsfreiheit und offene Gesellschaften. Die Existenz von Spionagetechnologie darf nicht die Politik bestimmen. Wir haben die moralische Pflicht, dafür zu sorgen, dass unsere Gesetze und Werte Überwachungsprogramme begrenzen und Menschenrechte schützen.

    Die Gesellschaft kann diese Probleme nur verstehen und kontrollieren durch eine offene, ohne Rücksichten geführte und sachkundige Debatte. Am Anfang haben einige Regierungen, die sich durch die Enthüllungen der Massenüberwachungssysteme bloßgestellt fühlten, eine noch nie dagewesene Verfolgungskampagne initiiert, die diese Debatte unterdrücken sollte. Sie schüchterten Journalisten ein und kriminalisierten das Veröffentlichen der Wahrheit. Zu dieser Zeit war die Öffentlichkeit noch nicht imstande, den Nutzen dieser Enthüllungen zu ermessen. Sie verließ sich darauf, dass ihre Regierungen schon richtig entscheiden.

    Heute wissen wir, dass dies ein Fehler war und dass ein solches Handeln nicht dem öffentlichen Interesse dient. Die Debatte, die sie verhindern wollten, findet nun in Ländern auf der ganzen Welt statt. Und anstatt Schaden anzurichten, wird jetzt der Nutzen dieses neuen öffentlichen Wissens für die Gesellschaft klar, weil nun Reformen in der Politik, bei der Aufsicht und bei Gesetzen vorgeschlagen werden.

    Die Bürger müssen dagegen kämpfen, dass Informationen über Angelegenheiten von entscheidender öffentlicher Bedeutung unterdrückt werden. Wer die Wahrheit ausspricht, begeht kein Verbrechen.

    Diesen Text schrieb Edward Snowden am 1. November 2013 in Moskau. Er erreichte die SPIEGEL-Redaktion über einen verschlüsselten Kanal.