Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

It wasn’t that my classmates didn’t care enough to fight, it was that they couldn’t afford to: the system was designed so that the perceived cost of escalation exceeded the expected benefit of resolution.

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It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally resolved to resist, such resistance were futile. The generations to come would have to get used to a world in which surveillance wasn’t something occasional and directed in legally justified circumstances, but a constant and indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent.

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