WE HAVE all heard the warnings.
‘Be careful what you post online.’ ‘We all leave a digital footprint.’ ‘Nothing is ever truly deleted.’
But we never really think much of it. Most of us are not that bothered about checking in at our favourite restaurant while posing in a selfie with our bestie.
But in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, former spies say we should care about what we post online saying it gives authorities even more unfettered access into our private lives.
“Facebook is evil, in my view, I’ve been saying this for years,” Annie Machon, a former MI5 agent, told the Germany documentary Digital Dissidents which airs on the ABC Four Corners program tonight. “It is the spy’s wet dream.
“We offer our information and it’s just there on a plate for the spies to access. And we know they do through backdoors and things. And yet, that sort of information used to take them weeks or months to gather on an individual.”
Ms Machon, along with her former partner David Shayler, who was a MI6 spy, broke protocol in the mid-90s by exposing alleged crimes committed by the British intelligence service, MI5.
The pair were forced to flee Britain and lived underground for a year. After two years in Paris the pair returned to the UK. Shayler went to prison but Machon was spared.
Since then she has campaigned for the rights of whistleblowers around the world and fights for government accountability.
She tells the documentary, which looks at whether whistleblowers, or “digital dissidents”, are regarded as heroes or traitors, that the only way a person can have complete privacy is to “take it in our own hands”.
“We can’t trust the corporations, we can’t trust our governments and we certainly cannot trust the spy agencies to respect our privacy and respect the law,” she said.
“When David Shayler and I ended up and going on the run after we had blown the whistle on a series of crimes from MI5, we were very conscious of exactly how they could be targeting us
and investigating us.
“Because we know that our computers, our telephones, all of that can be compromised.
“The video can be switched on remotely; the audio can be switched on remotely. They can log what we write on the keyboards. They can even – and this comes from the Snowden disclosures – they can even use micro waves apparently to beam onto the screen and read what you are
typing.”
The decision by Machon, and her former partner to speak out is the same as other whistleblowers — to expose the truth.
When former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents containing covert US surveillance programs it exposed the capabilities of the US spy agency to monitor communications around the globe.
However he was branded a traitor.
“Criticise me, hate me, but think about what matters in the issues. Right? Think about the world you want to live in,” Snowden says in the documentary. “All of our communications are being intercepted, collected, analysed and stored automatically, and that means that all of our ideas, all of our thoughts, all of our expressions, our associations, who we talk to, who we meet, who we love, who we hate.
“If you let go your rights for a moment, you have lost them for a lifetime. And that’s why this matters: It’s because it happened and we didn’t know about that. We weren’t told about it.”
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