Ed Snowden Explains Privacy

Regardless of what you think about me - regardless of whether what I did was the wrong thing or the right thing - what does it mean that a 29-year-old contractor could walk into the NSA, walk out with what the government contends is an unknowable number of files, provide these to journalists in secret, and the government doesn't know about it until the individual is sitting down in the room with the journalists? What if that individual weren't going to the press? What if they weren't trying to help things? What if they were spying on people's communications and sharing them for monetary gain, or if they were actually a foreign intelligence agent? The fact that controls are so lax in an agency with so much power should concern everyone.

There has been so much interest in this topic. There has been so much that people want to do to try to address these problems, real or perceived, in terms of the mass surveillance of people in this country, and of course, overseas to a greater extent. At the same time, what you see as apathy, I think ... is a sense of disempowerment. ... Trying to solve everything comprehensively [...] feels like it's unreachably large for people who don't have their entire life to dedicate to it.

I think the response we should have here is to think about what you CAN do, and one of the most important things you can do is talk about it.

Think about what's really at stake here. It's not about surveillance, it's about rights. When people say, "I don't care about privacy because I've got nothing to hide," they don't really understand what privacy is about. Privacy isn't about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. That thing - privacy - is the right to the self. Privacy is what allows you to decide what it is you believe. What you think about. Freedom of speech doesn't really mean much unless you have the space to think. Freedom of religion doesn't mean anything unless you have the freedom from prejudice, from outside forces - the space within yourself to decide what it is that you want to worship.

Even when we get down to the language of private property, you cannot have a claim to yourself unless there is a right to the self. Otherwise, you're simply entirely subject to the whims of the collective. Saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is the same as saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. It is the most fundamentally anti-social thing I can think about, because even IF you did not need it - and many people who are in positions of privilege and positions of power really don't, because they're who the authorities are there to support. They're who the authorities are there to protect. If you are a minority, if you are a little bit different in any way, if you are a little bit radical, or you dissent in any way against the prerogatives or the privileges of the people who have the most power, rights are for you. If you want to have them, you better stand up and defend them.

  Edward Snowden at Chicago Institute of Politics