Nastya Corpuscula about the fantastic action game "Snowden"
Former CIA employee30-year-old Edward Snowden, who confused secret information about the surveillance of US civilians to the press, was accused of divulging state secrets almost a month ago. The day before yesterday, the desire to provide him asylum was confirmed by Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia; yesterday, a community of former CIA employees awarded the Adam Samon Prize award to Snowden for honesty. In the meantime, he has been sitting (seemingly) for the second week in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, causing comparisons with the hero of the Spielberg Terminal.
Last week, the story almost turned into "Mr. and Mrs. Smith": the former spy Anna Chapman offered Snowden his hand and heart (though only on Twitter). Nastya Chastitsyna, better known as the blogger Corpuscula, explains that reality repeats cinema and that Snowden is the very hero of the 21st century, whose appearance was actually predicted not by spy fighters, but by The Matrix and Terminator.
Nastya Chastitsyna
At the crossroads Two women came up to me, seemingly typical "Let They Speak" program viewers, and one, while continuing the conversation, said the other: "He has some kind of stupid face for the cushion, but maybe he sat there at the computer and pretended to be a fool then I could not stand it, especially since he is so young. " Snowden, I thought. The second replied: "Well, remember the Rosenberg ..." Then they overtook me, and I still did not know how they relate to the act of Snowden in historical perspective.
I don’t know what surprised me more - what they remember about the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were probably executed five years before the birth of these two women and thirty years before the birth of Edward Snowden, or that their generally worried about the fate of a thirty-year-old computer security specialist at the NSA. Maybe they vaguely felt - and women in general have a delicate feeling - that this guy is the hero of our time.
Snowden continued what Julian Assange and Aaron Schwartz started before him. All three are young - from 26 (Schwartz) to 41 (Assange), all related to programming and computer technologies, all exposed the system and called for the fight for civil rights, be it freedom of information or privacy protection. As a result, Assange is on the international wanted list in connection with the rape charges and is forced to hide in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Aaron Schwarz threatened 30 years in prison for fraud and illegal downloading of information, in January of this year he committed suicide under unclear circumstances. You know about Snowden: according to the accusations in absentia, he shines from 30 to 50 years in prison, and now he hangs in the transit zone "Sheremetyevo", like the hero of Tom Hanks in the movie "Terminal".
You can explain the actions of all three by any conspiracy theories,
but they all break into one important circumstance: in order to spoil your life in this way, you must really believe in what you are doing.
But this plot has long been familiar to everyone from fantastic films. A certain faceless system, Skynet, the Matrix, the Bloody Gebnya, or the Secret World Government created by people, so that, as they think, to improve life, slowly get out of control and seize power over their own creators. Humanity began to perform the function of batteries, but here a hero emerges - stubborn and hacker Neo or John Connor - and tries to overcome the system. The system, of course, resists, it sends its agents Smith and Terminator, who in one way or another should bring to the rebel the idea that resistance is not only useless, but also destructive, because is it bad for you to live with batteries? And if the rebel does not agree, he will be destroyed or locked up forever within four walls, be it a prison cell, a room in the Ecuadorian embassy or an airport transit zone.
And what about saved humanity? Realizing that it is connected to the matrix-prism, it split: according to surveys in the American media, on average, about 40% of the audience consider Snowden a hero and as much a traitor. 10% do not consider anything.
Compatriots, as always, full of skepticism. The most typical comment in runet: "Yes, we are being watched. Just think, he said something that everyone already knew," although such comments are desperately negative on Habrakhabr. Total snooping disturbs us much less than deleting music or losing an account on a social network. Lost your favorite photo? Drama and the machinations of enemies. All my actions are recorded by the special services, and even foreign? And God bless them, do not interfere with downloading a song. Is all this happening at the state level? Well, let.
In Russia, the concept of "private life" refers to the field of abstractions, and the Americans still have the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution for two hundred years now, so they express some concern: they sign petitions and point out the law. We quietly try to bypass the system if it begins to interfere with us in our non-existent privacy. In the Russian version of the Matrix, there would have been no Neo, just the battery people would quietly close and go to Zion to drink beer while the matrix was experiencing power outages. In a week, she would go into sleep mode. But after walking in the grimy reality, people would return to their cocoons before the next spree. And no Smith agents can stop it. The system is powerless against chaos.