A Timely Thriller: "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 were waking up to the revelation, thanks to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, that the National Security Agency (N.S.A) has been spying on us, collecting data for seven years on every phone call, domestic and international, that Americans make. The reason given is that same tired trope: To keep us secure 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.” East consists of a band of furious idealists (Sarah and her employer see them as anarchists) who target pharmaceutical companies that unleash poisonous medicines on vulnerable people and conglomerates that pollute our air, water and soil. (Remember 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: “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.” (In this, they are the heir to the late Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey-Wrench Gang.)

It is that “spy on us and we’ll spy on you” motif that has made “The East” such a compelling draw in the wake of the N.S.A 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 the marginalized and the powerless through poisonous pills and polluted water.

It is one thing to remain silent when facts are unknown but another when facts are known and we cannot quiet that “still small voice” any longer. It is a moral dilemma we all face in one form or another and which defines us, based on what we end up doing or not doing.

The Internet has undoubtedly facilitated 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 and blog and email and likes and tweets, we leave behind digital traces that can be used against us at the whim of people in power.

About the intrusion of Big Brother, the increasingly relevant George Orwell wrote in “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 in “1984”: “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.

Greenwald and The Washington Post revealed another secret program under George Bush, code-named Prism, that allows the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. to tap Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, copying audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails and documents to track foreign targets.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama assured Americans after the snooping report broke. He also defended the “program” by shrugging it off 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 or Stalin’s Soviet Union. At the same time, we must also remember that we cannot remain secure by undermining those values that make us Americans.

Ultimately for Sarah, the end cannot justify the means, and so there is a falling out between the protagonists in “The East.” But it is by no means 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 flower when we make an effort to engage our better angels.

Young Arabs Cross the Rubicon

“I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.”

Those were the stirring words President Obama used at his Cairo speech in June of 2009. But eloquence and oratory cannot mask reality. As Egyptians rise is revolt against the kleptocracy of Hosni Mubarak, the Obama administration is desperately trying to adjust its sails against the furious wind of change sweeping Egypt. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially praised Egypt’s “stability” under Mubarak but now that the Arabs have crossed Rubicon, she is using words like “restraint” and “reform” and urging “transition to a democratic regime.”

Why does the United States so often finds itself on the wrong side of history, at least initially? Why does it so easily settle for Faustian bargains with autocrats like Mubarak? For the Muslim world, in particular, America’s policy has been driven by an irrational combination of oil, Israel and Islamic terror. Mubarak used the bogeyman of “Islamic Jihadists” (Muslim brotherhood in his case) to convince America that keeping him in power was the only option, and so our government obliged him with $1.3b in military aid every year. Not just the tanks and the fighter planes, even the tear gas and the rubber bullets being used against Egyptians bear the label “Made in America.” Only the water in the water cannons presumably comes from the Nile. Is it any wonder that ordinary Egyptians do not quite look upon America as a beacon of freedom and democracy?

In his second State of the Union address on January 25, President Obama equated Tunisian revolution with freedom. “We saw,” he said, “that same desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful that the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: the United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”

What a golden opportunity the President missed by not including Egypt in his address! Extolling the virtues of democracy, the President said, “… as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometime be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on earth. We may have differences in policy, but we all believe in the rights enshrined in our Constitution. We may have different opinions but we believe in the same promise that says this is a place where you can make it if you try. We may have different backgrounds, but we believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything’s possible, no matter who you are, no matter where you come from.”

As my Egyptian friend Mustafa asked: “Does this mean that the United States reserves the right to experiment with democracy to enjoy its fruits, while Muslim puppets deny democracy to their people to cater to misguided American interests? This is nothing but arrogance and hypocrisy.”

American-Muslims, meanwhile, have thrown their full support behind Egyptians fighting unarmed for their freedom. During the Friday Khutbah in the largest mosque in California’s Silicon Valley, for instance, the Imam urged us to pray for their success in throwing out the pharaoh and preventing dynastic decadence. In solidarity with the Egyptian anger revolution, American Muslims have already demonstrated in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston. More protest marches are planned.

During the Tunisian revolution, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his sycophants cut off Internet access, particularly access to Facebook. As reported by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic, the Facebook security team at its headquarters in Silicon Valley discovered that Ammar, the nickname Tunisians have given to the authorities that censor the Internet, was trying to steal an entire country's worth of passwords. With the stolen passwords, Ammar was deleting Tunisians’ Facebook accounts!

After more than ten days of intensive investigation, Facebook's security team realized that Tunisia’s Internet service providers (ISP) were running a malicious piece of code that was recording users' login information when they went to sites like Facebook.

The security team coded a two-step response. First, all Tunisian requests for Facebook were routed to an https server. The https protocol encrypts the information sent across it (the “s” in “https” stands for “secure” or “secure sockets layer” (SSL), so it is not vulnerable to the keylogging strategy used by the Tunisian ISPs. The second technical solution was a "roadblock" for anyone who had logged out and then back in during the time when the Tunisian malicious code was running.

Facebook rolled out the new solutions to all of Tunisia five days after the company discovered what was happening, and access to the site was restored.

Hosni Mubarak also followed the path of his now-deposed fellow-dictator: He ordered the state-controlled ISPs to completely cut off Egypt’s Internet access. But Egyptians were not deterred. The air was charged with electricity and possibilities. The revolution had taken on a momentum of its own, and while Facebook and Twitter initially helped, Egyptians had already transcended the Internet.

Still, it is reasonable to expect that companies like Facebook will give special consideration to activists trying to overthrow repressive regimes. If the company wants to remain central to people's political aspirations, it has to come up with a powerful, long-term solution that can be activated at a moment’s notice when access to the site is denied by any country. From a hardware point of view, if dictators block Internet data pipes into their countries, perhaps multiple satellite connections as backups can be in place so that communication can continue uninterrupted in spite of latency issues.

However the technology evolves, the days of dictators who equate dissent with treason and oppress and torture their people are coming to an end. Muslim nations are beset by modern-day pharaohs. For the creativity of millions of Muslims to flower in freedom, the pharaohs will be overthrown, if not today, then certainly tomorrow. That is the lesson of Tunisia and Egypt.

Balance in a Wired World

For two days this week, Internet service to my home was disrupted. A rogue cable somewhere baffled technicians and repairmen for 48 hours until they were able to locate and fix it. But what this unplugged state from the wired world revealed to me about myself is a lesson I am determined to heed for the rest of my life.

It wasn't as if I wasn't on the Web during these two days. Sitting in front of a computer at work, there's always time for checking email from friends, catching up with news, posting a subversive thought or two on Twitter.

It's when I returned home that I realized with a shock that I had become used to repeating what I did at work: Head straight for the laptop, start checking email, catch up with the news, post more stuff on Twitter.

The first night of disconnection made me restless, edgy. My wife asked me to calm down but I couldn't. I was angry at my ISP and began mentally composing the tough words I would use against them. I would post my thoughts on Yelp and other sites. I would let the world know to what darkness my ISP had thrown me into.

It was only when I was feeling so utterly lost that I realized I had a become a prisoner of my deadening habit. The truth was, there was nothing important waiting for me on the Web. Nothing.

I stepped out of the house. A full moon had risen over the brooding hills, surrounded by diaphanous clouds. It had rained in the day and the evening was cool. A night bird called from the dark interior of a tree. Deep silence. Only the leaves stirred in the small wind.

How could I have become so mechanical, so data-driven, when the real world lay about me, richer and more magnificent in every way? Without even being aware of it, I had traded the real for the artificial.

My wife and I took a walk around the block, our path lit by magical moonlight. It was like returning to earth after being away in a cold and distant planet.

Wordsworth wrote:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune ...

So this is the promise I have made to myself. No more Web after work. Family, book, laughter, nature, food, music, conversation. Real people and real stuff for the replenishment of the real soul.