At its root was a decision dating to Snowden’s earliest contact with the NSA - “the first thing that you might call a principle that occurred to me during this idle but formative time,” as the future government systems engineer puts it in the excerpt below: The determination to live in an honest world, a world where people could show their true faces and own their full history, a world without shame. Now, in his new memoir “ Permanent Record,” Snowden explains how his revolutionary act of whistleblowing came to occur. Six years ago, he provided documents about this electronic panopticon to journalists, and the shocking revelations that ensued set off massive changes - changes in attitudes and behaviors, in policies and technologies, across private industry and the public sector, in the U.S. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.While working for the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden helped build a system to enable the United States government to capture all phone calls, text messages, and emails.
Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. “There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy.
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