Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

all companies had to do was figure out how to put themselves in the middle of those social exchanges and turn them into profit.

surveillance capitalism,

The appearance of ownership was easy to mistake for the reality of it. Few of us understood it at the time, but none of the things that we’d go on to share would belong to us anymore.

The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens,

during the American Revolution was called “liberty” and during the Internet Revolution is called “privacy.”

The attempts by elected officials to delegitimize journalism have been aided and abetted by a full-on assault on the principle of truth. What is real is being purposefully conflated with what is fake, through technologies that are capable of scaling that conflation into unprecedented global confusion.

To give an account of my life while protecting the privacy of my loved ones and not exposing legitimate government secrets is no simple task, but it is my task. Between those two responsibilities—that is where to find me.

To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about after you’d violated them. If you were anything like me, you were scandalized.

In school, you were told that in the system of American politics, citizens give consent through the franchise to be governed by their equals. This is democracy.

any opposition to this system would be difficult, not least because getting its rules changed to serve the interests of the majority would involve persuading the rule makers to put themselves at a purposeful disadvantage. That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect intentionally integrated into every system, in both politics and computing: the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.

just accept the fact that I’d never had a voice to begin with.

the benevolent tyranny of school, like all tyrannies, has a limited shelf life.

At a certain point, the denial of agency becomes a l...

hacking—which remains the sanest, healthiest, and most educational way I know for kids to assert autonomy and address adults on equal terms.

This is the origin of all hacking: the awareness of a systemic linkage between input and output, between cause and effect. Because hacking isn’t just native to computing—it exists wherever rules do. To hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and exploiting all the vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually works, or could be made to work. In capitalizing on these unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules as much as debunking them.

Everything gets subsumed by the job, which begins with a denial of character and ends with a denial of conscience.