NSA, Fort Meade. Public Domain/Trevor Paglen.The Snowden disclosures of 2013 – through the sheer scale of the documents leaked to investigative journalists, and the precision of the data residing within the documents themselves – have partly changed the rules of the game for the signals intelligence (SIGINT) services working in western democracies. But they have also had paradoxical effects.
The possibility of denying the existence of personal data interception and all the surrounding communication data related to this, together with the denial of investigative journalism concerning the reality and intensity of sensitive data exchange between the different western intelligence services, has been eliminated. Now, if secret services refuse to recognise that they have undertaken such practices, they are the ones not to be believed by the public. ‘Truth’ is on the side of the whistle-blower.
The ‘truth regime’ is changing: the ‘reason of the state’ has to bow before the necessity of ‘publicity’ in democracies.
