Welcome to the Memory Hole
Disappearing Edward Snowden
By Peter Van Buren
What
if Edward Snowden was made to disappear? No, I’m not suggesting some
future CIA rendition effort or a who-killed-Snowden conspiracy theory of
a disappearance, but a more ominous kind.
What if everything a
whistleblower had ever exposed could simply be made to go away? What if
every National Security Agency (NSA) document Snowden released, every
interview he gave, every documented trace of a national security state
careening out of control could be made to disappear in real-time? What
if the very posting of such revelations could be turned into a
fruitless, record-less endeavor?
Am I suggesting the plot for a
novel by some twenty-first century George Orwell? Hardly. As we edge
toward a fully digital world, such things may soon be possible, not in
science fiction but in our world -- and at the push of a button. In
fact, the earliest prototypes of a new kind of “disappearance” are
already being tested. We are closer to a shocking, dystopian reality
that might once have been the stuff of futuristic novels than we
imagine. Welcome to the memory hole.
Even if some future
government stepped over one of the last remaining red lines in our world
and simply assassinated whistleblowers as they surfaced, others would
always emerge. Back in 1948, in his eerie novel 1984,
however, Orwell suggested a far more diabolical solution to the
problem. He conjured up a technological device for the world of Big
Brother that he called "the memory hole."
In his dark future, armies of bureaucrats, working in what he
sardonically dubbed the Ministry of Truth, spent their lives erasing or
altering documents, newspapers, books, and the like in order to create
an acceptable version of history. When a person fell out of favor, the
Ministry of Truth sent him and all the documentation relating to him
down the memory hole. Every story or report in which his life was in any
way noted or recorded would be edited to eradicate all traces of him.
In
Orwell's pre-digital world, the memory hole was a vacuum tube into
which old documents were physically disappeared forever. Alterations to
existing documents and the deep-sixing of others ensured that even the
sudden switching of global enemies and alliances would never prove a
problem for the guardians of Big Brother. In the world he imagined,
thanks to those armies of bureaucrats, the present was what had always
been -- and there were those altered documents to prove it and nothing
but faltering memories to say otherwise. Anyone who expressed doubts
about the truth of the present would, under the rubric of “
thoughtcrime,” be marginalized or eliminated.
Government and Corporate Digital Censorship
Increasingly,
most of us now get our news, books, music, TV, movies, and
communications of every sort electronically. These days, Google earns
more
advertising revenue than all U.S. print media combined. Even the venerable
Newsweek no longer publishes a
paper edition. And in that digital world, a certain kind of “simplification” is being explored. The
Chinese,
Iranians,
and others are, for instance, already implementing web-filtering
strategies to block access to sites and online material of which their
governments don’t approve. The U.S. government similarly (if somewhat
fruitlessly) blocks its employees from
viewing Wikileaks and Edward Snowden material (as well as websites like
TomDispatch) on their work computers -- though not of course at home. Yet.
Great
Britain, however, will soon take a significant step toward deciding
what a private citizen can see on the web even while at home. Before the
end of the year, almost all Internet users there will be “opted-in” to a
system designed to
filter out
pornography. By default, the controls will also block access to
"violent material," "extremist and terrorist related content," "anorexia
and eating disorder websites," and "suicide related websites." In
addition, the new settings will censor sites mentioning alcohol or
smoking. The filter will also block "esoteric material," though a
UK-based rights group says the government has yet to make clear what
that category will include.
And government-sponsored forms of
Internet censorship are being privatized. New, off-the-shelf commercial
products guarantee that an organization does not need to be the NSA to
block content. For example, the Internet security company
Blue Coat
is a domestic leader in the field and a major exporter of such
technology. It can easily set up a system to monitor and filter all
Internet usage, blocking web sites by their address, by keywords, or
even by the content they contain. Among others, Blue Coat software is
used by the U.S. Army to
control what its soldiers see while deployed abroad, and by the repressive governments in
Syria,
Saudi Arabia, and Burma to block outside political ideas.
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