Spying, privacy and “The East”

Timing can transform a good movie into a memorable one. Such is the case with the thriller "The East," released just as we are trying to come to terms with the revelation that the U.S. National Security Agency (N.S.A) has been spying on Americans, collecting data for seven years on every phone call, domestic and international, that we make (Ex-CIA man 'exposes' global snooping). The reason given is that same tired trope: To save us from terrorists. (Naturally, the recent Boston Bombing was an exception, as is every other undetected act of terror!)

In the movie, Sarah (Brit Marling) is an undercover agent hired by a private intelligence firm to infiltrate an eco-terrorism cell called "The East." It consists of a band of furious idealists (others call them anarchists) who target companies committing worldwide terrorism. And who might they be? Pharmaceutical companies unleashing poisonous medicines on vulnerable people and conglomerates destroying the ecosystem of water, air and soil. (Recall the deadly antibiotic called Fluoroquinolones, or the 2010 BP oil spill, or the arsenic poisoning of water in Small Town, U.S.A. from coal slurry and other industrial wastes?)

The group's manifesto is: "We are the East. Lie to us and we'll lie to you. Spy on us and we'll spy on you. Poison us and we'll poison you."

It is that chilling "spy on us and we'll spy on you" motif that has made "The East" such a compelling draw in the wake of the spying revelations. Of course, citizens cannot snoop on the government but if a movie can offer a willing suspension of disbelief in these troubled times, we eagerly lap it up.

Other members are suspicious of Sarah but the infiltrator wins over the East's enigmatic leader Benji (Alexander Skarsgård) and proceeds to destroy the group from within. Yet, imperceptibly, she is also drawn to the justice inherent in the retaliation against the one-percenters who are callously indifferent to the death and destruction they inflict on people through poisonous pills and polluted water.

It is a simple matter to extrapolate from companies to Big Brother government. With its potential for corrosive and corruptive influence, the Internet can undoubtedly facilitate the growth of the surveillance state. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the Internet is the de facto surveillance state, that with every click, search, blog, email, likes and tweets, we leave behind digital traces that can be used against us at the whim of people in power.

The increasingly relevant George Orwell wrote in his prescient "1984": "How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to."

About one thing, however, Orwell was wrong, when he wrote that "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment."

We do not have the luxury of such ignorance anymore: We now know that we are being watched and tracked at any given moment, that everyone is being spied on, to be manipulated and exploited in insidious ways for profit, greed and fear.

In 2007, the-then Senator Barack Obama criticized Bush administration's Patriot Act and the "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." At the time, he was echoing Benjamin Franklin's observation that "Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Now we learn that President Obama has not only continued Bush's attack on privacy but, in some cases, even expanded it. Add to it his administration's record of prisoners being denied due process at Guantanamo and the C.I.A. not being held accountable for deaths by drones, and it is easy to understand why Obama supporters feel let down.

In California's Silicon Valley, the disappointment and the dismay are palpable. A Stanford computer scientist said that "most of the people who developed the network are bothered by the way it is being misused. From the beginning we worried about governments getting control. Well, our government has finally found a way to tap in."

A well-known entrepreneur observed that the "success of any Silicon Valley consumer company is based not only on the value their products bring to users but also on the level of trust they can establish. What is at stake here is the credibility of our entire ecosystem."

Deepening the mystery is how leading Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft could so easily acquiesce to the government's demand to collect private data from their servers.

Glenn Greenwald, an American lawyer and reporter for the U.K.-based Guardian, and author of "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful," was the one who broke the news. His source was Edward Snowden, a former Central Intelligence Agency employee now holed up in Hong Kong, who was driven to open up to Greenwald because he believed "the Internet's value was being destroyed by unceasing surveillance."

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," President Obama assured the Americans after governmental snooping came to light. He defended the "program" as a "modest encroachments on privacy," justified because, as always, it will "help us prevent terrorist attacks."

America will not turn into a totalitarian police state along the lines of, say, East Germany during the cold war or the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin.

At the same time, however, we must remember that we cannot be secure by undermining the values that make us Americans.

Ultimately for Sarah in "The East," the end cannot justify the means, and so there is a falling out between the protagonists. But it is not an unsatisfactory falling out. There is pathos and surprise and moral ambiguity aplenty in the thriller. Particularly in matters of morality, we learn that it does not have to be an either-or proposition, that there is almost always a middle path in which justice can also flower when we make an effort to engage our better angels.

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Hasan Zillur Rahim is an educator and a technologist working in Silicon Valley. His specializes in advancing education through technology.