On Liberty: Edward Snowden and top writers on what freedom means to them

As the campaining group turns 80, Shami Chakrabarti, Ian McEwan, Tom Stoppard, Julian Barnes and others reflect on liberty

Edward Snowden, Shami Chakrabarti, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, Rosie Boycott, Tom Stoppard and others

Shami Chakrabarti

Writers have always been a big part of Liberty. Since our very beginnings, as the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) in 1934, they've played a key role in our battle to protect civil liberties and promote human rights in Britain. HG Wells, Vera Brittain, EM Forster, AA Milne, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are just a few of the authors who supported Liberty in the early years – and perhaps it's not surprising that those who write feel a special affinity with Liberty's values and ideals. Now on Monday we will celebrate 80 years of "the fight that is never done".

Orwell's observations on the power of language "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable" is something that Liberty has witnessed throughout its history – "extraordinary rendition" wasn't sweet singing, but a chilling euphemism for kidnap and torture during the "war on terror". "Waterboarding" was never a seaside sport. Governments have twisted words to sanitise abomination and obscure outrage. But literature can sometimes change minds and behaviour more convincingly than the most forceful examples of political polemic or even legislation.

Shami Chakrabarti is director of Liberty.

Edward Snowden

Today, an ordinary person can't pick up the phone, email a friend or order a book without comprehensive records of their activities being created, archived, and analysed by people with the authority to put you in jail or worse. I know: I sat at that desk. I typed in the names.

When we know we're being watched, we impose restraints on our behaviour – even clearly innocent activities – just as surely as if we were ordered to do so. The mass surveillance systems of today, systems that pre-emptively automate the indiscriminate seizure of private records, constitute a sort of surveillance time-machine – a machine that simply cannot operate without violating our liberty on the broadest scale. And it permits governments to go back and scrutinise every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever spoken to, and derive suspicion from an innocent life. Even a well-intentioned mistake can turn a life upside down.

To preserve our free societies, we have to defend not just against distant enemies, but against dangerous policies at home. If we allow scarce resources to be squandered on surveillance programmes that violate the very rights they purport to defend, we haven't protected our liberty at all: we have paid to lose it.

Edward Snowden is a former NSA contractor and whistleblower.

Julian Barnes

Idealists like to claim that freedom is indivisible. Pragmatists know that it is not: on the contrary, it is easily divisible into thousands of parts, each of which has to be fought for, defended, and fought for again.

Those who wish to deprive us of freedoms rarely do so at one go, and are skilled at assuring us that loss of freedom is really something else, something necessary and advantageous, like greater safety. As soon as a politician tells you that decent, law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from a particular measure, you can be certain that someone, somewhere, is losing a small or larger part of his or her freedom. So we need a constant, committed, cogent defence of our freedoms: in other words, liberty needs Liberty.

Ian McEwan

The idea of liberty grandly shelters many sorts of freedom, all of which, until the onset of modernity, had little definition in human aspirations. We reach easily now for concepts that once had no existence: the freedoms of universal franchise, of travel within and between countries, of assembly, association, worship, privacy, sexual equality and preference, of due process, of freedom from torture – the list goes on and is enriched by the proliferating concept of rights – of prisoners, patients, children, animals, of rights to clean water, food, a family life. Everywhere in the world, some or all of these remain contested.

But one freedom underpins the entire list. Without it, the aspirations clustered under liberty's umbrella could not have come into being. Every freedom we possess or are struggling to possess has had to be thought and talked and written into existence, which is why the rock on which liberty stands is freedom of expression. Democracy without it is a sham.

Historically, it was the work of many hands and free spirits to give birth to the notion that human rights are universal, inalienable and indivisible. The giving and receiving of information, speculation, criticism, fantasy, the exchange within the entire range of our intellectual capacities, is the freedom that brings the others into being. For freedom tends to evolve and proliferate – if you let it. Repressive states know this instinctively, which is why they find free-thinking journalists, intellectuals, artists (even a Russian punk collective), so threatening.

In many parts of the world, an organisation such as Liberty would not be tolerated. That it has had to fight so hard and well for 80 years is a kind of unhappy birthday. But this brave outfit represents the essence of what freedom of expression enables – the flourishing of all conceivable liberties.

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