Category: News

Eben Moglen, professor of law and Courage advisory board member, has published an extended essay in the Guardian on Snowden, his revelations, and privacy in the surveillance age.

Moglen describes how Snowden has “nobly advanced our effort to save democracy” by blowing the whistle, and praises his courageous sacrifice, writing: “Snowden saw what happened to other whistleblowers, and behaved accordingly.” Moglen continues, “He knew the price, he knew the reason. But as he said, only the American people could decide, by their response, whether sacrificing his life was worth it.”

Whilst Snowden may be judged by Americans primarily, Moglen argues that his revelations of mass surveillance present global issues: “I think Snowden means that we should make… decisions not in the narrow, national self-interest, but with some heightened moral sense of what is appropriate for a nation that holds itself out as a beacon of liberty to humanity.”

Moglen, who founded the Software Freedom Law Center, feels that the struggle to retain privacy is “far from hopeless. Snowden has described to us what armour still works… Hopelessness is merely the condition they want you to catch, not one you have to have.”

However, he identifies the passive acceptance of mass surveillance, in the form of defeatism or the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ ideology, as “the most significant forms of opposition that we face”. Moglen counters, “If we are not doing anything wrong, then we have a right to resist.”

Moglen’s essay is adapted from his four-part lecture series at Columbia Law School, entitled Snowden and the Future. You can watch the lecture series here.

Part one of PBS Frontline’s new documentary, The United States of Secrets, recounts Edward Snowden’s disclosure of thousands of NSA documents detailing rampant surveillance, and how the United States came to spy on millions of innocent Americans’ every communication. The film features interviews with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, Senator Ron Wyden, and many more.

You can watch each of the interviews here.

Part two will air Tuesday, May 20, on PBS, and can later be found here.

Alexa O’Brien, an independent journalist who has documented Chelsea Manning’s trial at length, interviewed WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison, Acting Director of Courage, at the 2014 re:publica conference.

Harrison, who escorted Edward Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow as he pursued political asylum, discusses publishing secret documents, the public’s right to know, and how her involvement with Snowden prevents her from returning to the UK.