TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - After the revelation of the United States National Security Agency's (NSA) extensive surveillance programs, the public have to choose between to fight back or else find themselves "complicit" in the activities, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) linguistics professor and philosopher Noam Chomsky.
The freedoms U.S. citizens have "weren't granted by gifts from above," Chomsky said during a panel discussion Friday at MIT. "They were won by popular struggle."
While US officials have long cited national security as a rationale for domestic surveillance programs, that same argument has been used by the "most monstrous systems" in history, such as the Stasi secret police in the former East Germany, Chomsky said.
"The difference with the totalitarian states is the citizens could not do a lot about it," in contrast to the U.S., he added. "If we do not expose the plea of security and separate the parts that are valid from the parts that are not valid, then we are complicit."
Investigative reporter Barton Gellman, who has received NSA document leaks from Snowden, mentioned in the same forum that a serious debate about what the lines should be is neccessary when it comes to government surveillance.
However, Gelman said that there is a crucial difference between the U.S. activities and that of the Stasi. "The Stasi was knowingly, deliberately, and cautiously squashing dissent," he said. "I do not think that is what we're seeing here at all."
As for the revelation itself, it is not clear on how many more information will come to light from the materials Snowden gave Gellman and other journalists. Snowden reportedly gave reporters up to 200,000 documents. "The [NSA] documents are far from complete," Gellman said.
PCWORLD | ABDUL MANAN
