Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

And so the geek inherited the earth.

Democracy could never be imposed at the point of a gun, but perhaps it could be sown by the spread of silicon and fiber.

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John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which employed the same self-evident, self-elect plural pronoun: “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.”

*

in order to flourish I had to specialize.

The GDPR treats the citizens of the European Union, whom it calls “natural persons,” as also being “data subjects”—that is, people who generate personally identifiable data. 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.

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