Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

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.

It would still be another half decade before the domotics revolution, before “virtual assistants” like Amazon Echo and Google Home were welcomed into the bedroom and placed proudly on nightstands to record and transmit all activity within range, to log all habits and preferences (not to mention fetishes and kinks), which would then be developed into advertising algorithms and converted into cash.

In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state.

“Let’s get one thing clear,” she said as we boarded, “I’m not protecting you. No one can protect you. What I’m here for is to make it harder for anyone to interfere. To make sure everyone’s on their best behavior.”

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.