Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

Imagine, if you will, that you could wake up every morning and pick a new name and a new face by which to be known to the world.

You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities—the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you want to cartwheel through later on a flaming horse, correcting the record with your sword of justice.

We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions, until we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we’re using are our own.

“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

first Tor server that connects you to the Tor network, called a gateway, knows you’re the one sending a request, but because it isn’t allowed to read that request, it has no idea whether you’re looking for pet memes or information about a protest, and the final Tor server that your request passes through, called an exit, knows exactly what’s being asked for, but has no idea who’s asking for it. This layering method is called onion routing, which gives Tor its name: it’s The Onion Router. The classified joke was that trying to surveil the Tor network makes spies want to cry.

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.

Seizing this equality of voice, independent of an organization’s managerial or decision-making hierarchy, is what is properly meant by the term “whistleblowing”—an act that’s particularly threatening to the IC, which operates by strict compartmentalization under a legally codified veil of secrecy.

This was the ultimate leap of faith, in a way: I could hardly trust anyone, so I had to trust everyone.

Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy.

the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose Article 12 states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation.

In 2016, the EU Parliament passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the most significant effort yet made to forestall the incursions of technological hegemony—which the EU tends to regard, not unfairly, as an extension of American hegemony.

In the US, data is usually regarded as the property of whoever collects it. But the EU posits data as the property of the person it represents, which allows it to treat our data subjecthood as deserving of civil liberties protections.