Chomsky speaks to Glasgow University students in support of choosing Snowden Rector

In a highly publicised and controversial campaign which brought record numbers to the ballot box, Glasgow University students last week overwhelmingly voted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as their new rector in a statement against public surveillance. It might not have been a popular choice at the Daily Mail, but the campaign did attract the attention of probably the world’s most vocal critic of US foreign policy, MIT’s Professor Noam Chomsky, who agreed to give a live video address to the students in a show of support.

On Friday afternoon in a lecture theatre full of pumped up and eager young people, Skype sprang to life exposing a Chomsky looking every one of his 84 years hunched over a desk searching for his notes. Once ready for his Skype close-up however, his voice and intent were as assured as ever. In a perfectly pitched 15 minute speech, he made direct and skilful connections between global political developments and the issues affecting the staff and students of Glasgow like zero hours contracts. There was even a respectful nod to the independence debate.

On the subject of Snowden, he was unequivocal: he’d performed the highest public duty of all by revealing to his fellow citizens what is being done to them by their own governments. Back on the more familiar territory of US global domination, he talked about the way the rest of the world – with some honourable exceptions including the former ‘backyard’ of South America – had done as the ‘master commands’ and capitulated in hunting the ‘traitor’ down.

He then examined the nature of ‘security’ that the mass surveillance program actually protects. Preventing terrorism that wants to bring down the Western way of life is the public line and the only compelling reason for abdicating so much power to the security agencies: but of the 54 terrorist actions the US government claimed had been thwarted by the program, only one stood up. It could be reasonably argued that one is enough. But by any calculations, it’s unlikely to provide a full explanation or defence for the scale of investment in surveillance. Especially in the face of evidence that the US government actively engages in activities, such as the drone campaign, which inevitably generate terrorist activity at a rate the security services clearly can’t expose it.

The vast security program, Chomsky argued, is in fact about safeguarding the state and corporate interests from public scrutiny............... more

and video at link


http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/02/26/prison-playground/