BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, November 14 2014

Alan Rusbridger's slide from Open Up? 2014

Wednesday in London, as part of the annual Open Up? conference hosted by the Omidyar Network, I had the opportunity to interview Alan Rusbridger, the longtime editor of The Guardian newspaper, about the impact of Edward Snowden's revelations of massive government surveillance programs in the United States and United Kingdom. To my surprise, he was much more optimistic about the impact of the stories published in his paper and elsewhere, like the Washington Post and New York Times, than I expected. And he laid out an extraordinarily ambitious agenda of unfinished work that Snowden has prompted.

Even though the sense of urgency and outrage over the NSA and GCHQ's dragnet surveillance may have subsided, he argued that "under the surface…an awful lot has changed." Among those changes: the very rise of open debate in the United States and Europe about these programs, the Obama administration's decision to shift how it stores phone meta-data, the upgrading of network security and encrypted services coming from major tech companies like Apple and Google, and the shifting mindset of both journalists and lawyers, who now understand that their communications aren't secure.

The one shortcoming, Rusbridger said, what that "politics isn't equipped to deal with the enormous number of issues that Snowden has raised." He added, "There's a problem of digital literacy in the people we charge to make these balances on our behalf. I look at the average Congressman or MP and I wonder how much they are equipped to have this discussion.

He then unfurled a slide that encapsulated his notes on "what Snowden has given us." It's quite a list. During the interview, it was literally unreadable from the stage, but here's my best effort to transcribe Rusbridger's catalogue of concerns:

DIGITAL ECONOMY

backlash

businesses built on our data

trust

$ at risk for US/UK

CONSENT

citizens' consent

did Parliament/Congress know? agree?

is consent meaningful? possible?

OVERSIGHT

ISC and Congress

judges

resources, technical knowledge

privacy advocates, PCLOB

"capture" mindset?

told the truth

meaningful?

SECURITY

haystack vs needle

war on terror

paedophiles, organized crime

drugs

Al Qaeda, ISIL

SECRET

keep everything secret

don't alert the bad guys

world goes "dark"

won't talk to press in UK

LEGALITY

is it?

do they break their own rules?

DATABASES

Manning, Snowden

giant databases post 9/11

impossible to keep secure

SILICON VALLEY

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc

security?

voluntary/compulsory cooperation

users' rights

transparency

TELECOMS

Verizon, Vodafone, etc

compulsory or voluntary

lawful or beyond?

consumers' rights

WEB

security/backdoors

foreign-domestic?

cryptology/protocols

Balkanization

"dark net" - Tor

HARM

our job 3000 times harder

bad guys change opsec

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Merkel's phone

G-20 allies

??

UN

PROPORTIONALITY + EFFECTIVENESS

does it work?

is it proportionate

how would we know

LAWS - AGENCIES

RIPA

FISA courts

DRIP

warrants?

"foreign" comms

4th Amendment

1st Amendment

Patriot Act

'Snoopers Charter'

analogue laws

CIVIL LIBERTIES

in a time of terror

represented in politics

'NATIONAL SECURITY'

Philby

Blake

Spycatcher

Wikileaks

PATRIOTISM

"Do you love your country"

treason?

LAWS - PRESS

Espionage Act

Official Secrets Act

Terror Act

David Miranda

Australian law

destroyed computers

JOURNALIST

Who's a journalist?

bloggers vs MSM

"activist" v objective

Guardian 'open' model

NYT/Risen

Wikileaks

Laura Poitras

Glenn Greenwald

POLITICS

can't won't discuss

narrow framework

IT literacy

capture?

CONFIDENTIALITY

journalists' sources

lawyers' communications

medical records

social media

anonymity

OPEN SOURCE

verifying

relative?

responsibility to?

whistleblower

criminal

Pentagon Papers

PRESS

prior restraint

censorship

national security

prior notification

"responsibility"

logistics

notice system

expertise

security

BBC?

dealings with government (look at/ don't look? rules?)

institutional strength

PRIVACY

data v metadata

consent

what does meta data know?

digital v physical

tracking movements

??, relationships

INTERNATIONAL REACTION

US (Hoover, Nixon)

Germany (Stais, Nazis)

UK (Enigma)

Europe

Brazil

Australia

That's a literally stunning mind map of the post-Snowden agenda, and also quite an intriguing view into Rusbridger's editorial brain. In my opinion, perhaps the only topic not clearly highlighted by his outline is the role of citizens in this debate, as voters, activists and consumers. But I think Rusbridger would agree that the public has a big role to play in sorting out how our world works now that we know what governments can do and have been doing with mass surveillance. During our conversation, I asked him whose job it was to wrestle with all these issues? He joked about perhaps someone funding this work, and then he added, "The only thing that I see that is up to the job of taking on this complexity is the web itself," meaning, all of us.