No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

by Glenn Greenwald

“Encryption matters, and it is not just for spies and philanderers.”

But the importance of privacy is evident in the fact that even those who devalue it, who have declared it dead or dispensable, do not believe the things they say. Anti-privacy advocates have often gone to great lengths to maintain control over the visibility of their own behavior and information. The US government itself has used extreme measures to shield its actions from public view, erecting an ever-higher wall of secrecy behind which it operates. As a 2011 report from the ACLU argued, “Today much of our government’s business is conducted in secret.” So secretive is this shadowy world, “so large, so unwieldy,” as the Washington Post reported, that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

As CNET put it, “Your personal life is now known as Facebook’s data. Its CEO’s personal life is now known as mind your own business.”

“The principle which protects personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but against publication in any form, is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate personality.”