Free-speech hypocrisy

The West is losing its liberal lustre

Since the events of September 11, 2001, the balance of power in the United States and in much of the Western world has swung noticeably away from liberal freedoms and towards the accoutrements of a security state. Events of the recent past - in particular, the hounding of whistleblowers in and out of the US military - have underlined this fact. Last week, the whistleblower who was known in the US army as Bradley Manning - who has declared that she self-identifies as a transgendered woman, and would prefer to be known henceforth as Chelsea Manning - was sentenced to decades in prison. Ms Manning has already been held in solitary confinement for months. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden, who worked for the private sector company Booz Allen Hamilton on projects subcontracted by the US National Security Agency, remains in Moscow, unable to return to the US for fear of a similar verdict. Even those in the media who have worked to bring Mr Snowden's revelations to the public have been harassed. Recently, the Brazilian boyfriend of a Guardian journalist who had interviewed Mr Snowden was detained without charges when he was transferring through London's Heathrow Airport, and the newspaper itself complained that hard disks it owned were confiscated and destroyed without due process.

That this is happening in those very countries that have long been bastions of freedom of speech is dismaying, especially for those who value such freedoms in the rest of the world. Former US president Richard Nixon is rightly remembered with opprobrium for what he did to Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the Pentagon's deceptions in Vietnam - but how is Barack Obama's administration, which has single-mindedly gone after Mr Snowden and Ms Manning, any better? Indeed, the security state affects not just whistleblowers; American information technology companies have routinely given up details to the state. Google, for example, which resists controls enforced by the Indian government and supports the idea of free speech, has handed over user information to the American authorities, and has even received payments from the National Security Agency for undertaking such surveillance on its users. At least, in the US, the companies have won a case allowing them to make public explicit details of what they are forced to hand over. In India, Yahoo! has legally challenged the authority of the Controller of Certifying Authorities, a body that under the Information Technology Act can ask for pretty much whatever information it wants - but the case is still going on. By relaxing their norms at home, the erstwhile strongholds of free speech have vastly expanded the borders of what less liberal regimes, such as India's, imagine is acceptable in terms of personal privacy and public transparency.

Technology today has made it vastly more easy to communicate across long distances; but it has also reduced the degree of privacy available to such communication. Sophisticated algorithms can isolate "troublesome" conversations even through data that are legal to collect. When powerful states then weigh in to further reduce the scope for individual freedom, many of the advantages of a more open and communicative economy are lost. Cloud computing, for example - in which users' personal data are stored on the internet and accessible to them everywhere - has been touted as a major direction forward for the information technology industry as well as for productivity across sectors. But people will hesitate to adopt it if it means that the state has access to their private data. In its expansion of the security state, and its persecution of those who reveal that expansion, the freedom-defending West is being hypocritical - and doing a great disservice to its own people and to others around the world.