It appears governments of the world and their secret agencies have trust issues with the public, as news of dragnet-style covert information gathering was leaked to the public this month, wherein the United States National Security Agency (NSA) admitted to running an operation codenamed PRISM, which essentially swept up massive amounts of mobile and online information.
The information collected allegedly includes email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, VOIP conversations, file transfers, login notifications and social networking details of not only American citizens, but also people living outside the United States, including Canadians – and all done without public knowledge.
Surprise, surprise, the public has trust issues with governments. It wasn't as though people did not think this was happening – just Google government secrets to see the stack of websites that appear. It's just that the public did not know it was happening. That is, until a 29-year-old NSA employee named Edward Snowden blew the whistle on PRISM earlier this month, in an attempt to force a truly public debate regarding privacy, security, trust and the increasing lack of all three.
‘Trust us', said the President of the United States, Barrack Obama, following the leak. He explained that the public may have to give up some freedom and privacy in order to gain security – which sounds a lot like his presidential predecessor George W. Bush.
Security, privacy and freedom are not mutually exclusive propositions. We can have security, while maintaining privacy and increasing freedom, but it all begins with trust.
The last people deserving of trust are the ones verbally requesting it. By showing one's own trustworthiness through actions and by trusting others, only then will trust truly be built and become beneficial.
The more we build trust, the more secure we will be and in turn we will become a less judgmental generation, which will allow people to exercise their individual freedoms while actually caring about the well-being of others.
A better world, if that's truly what we are aiming for, will not come about with tactics conjured up in George Orwell's book 1984.
It's time for new ideas to take hold.
One of our most prominent and successful online communities, Ebay, was built on two notions: people are generally good, and that trust is earned. Perhaps those notions can work in the physical world as well. It's at least worth a shot.
