Edward Snowden

	13 Nov 2019 This is the result of two decades of unckecked innovation... This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation - the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.
	13 Nov 2019 Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanism... Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanism by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science, if fact, is anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Haydn isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of sublte coercion.
	13 Nov 2019 She cheerfully shared her opinion that... She cheerfully shared her opinion that I was a fool for trusting media conglomerates to fairly guard the gate between the public and the truth.
	13 Nov 2019 Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind... Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit. Any government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy.
	13 Nov 2019 A change in law is infinitely more difficult to achieve... A change in law is infinitely more difficult to achieve than a change in technological standard, and as long as legal innovation lags behind technological innovation institutions will seek to abuse this disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to independent, open-source hardware and software developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.
	12 Nov 2019 I think everybody has had this kind of experience... I think averybody has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be, somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all my interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which experience I find more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former, but avoiding the latter is now difficult for everyone.
	12 Nov 2019 That was how you knew you could trust each other... That is how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crime.
	12 Nov 2019 I took along a cheap laptop running TAILS... I took along a chep laptop running TAILS, which is a LINUX-based “amnesiac” operating system - meaning it forgets everything when you turn it off, and starts fresh when you boot it up again, with no logs or memory traces of anything ever done on it. TAILS allowed me to easily “spoof”, or disguise, the laptop’s MAC: whenever it connected to a network it left behind the record of some other machine, in no way associable with mine. Useful enough, TAILS also had built-in support for connecting to the anonymizing Tor network.
	12 Nov 2019 It as in fact slightly better... It was in fact slightly better to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas an enemy is unlikely to share its prize even with its allies.
	12 Nov 2019 These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion... These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion if a media campaign, were shocking demonstraions of the state’s situational approach to secrecy: a seal that must be maintained for the government to act with impunity, but that can be broken whenever the government seeks to claim cedit.
	12 Nov 2019 Kids used to be able to go online... Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is the only environment in which you can grow up - by which I mean that the early Internet’s disassociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiflty punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.
	12 Nov 2019 I'd briefly jam a network... I’d briefly jam a network, causing its legitimate users to be booted off-line; in their attempt to reconnect, they’d automatically rebroadcast their “authentication packets”, which I could intercept and effectively decipher into passwords that would let me log on just like any other “authorized” user.
	12 Nov 2019 Ira "Gus" Hunt, chief technology officer... Ira “Gus” Hunt, chief technology officer of the CIA in front of US journalists (2013):
	12 Nov 2019 The agency's internal policies... The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as your legally protected personal property, nor regarded their collection of that data as a “search” or “seizure”. Instead, the NSA maintained that because you had already “shared” your phone records with a “third party” - your telephone service provider - you had forfeited any constitutional privacy interest you once mau have had.
	12 Nov 2019 There is simply no way to ignore privacy... There is simply no way to ignore privacy. Because citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up for convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have […]. You assume that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about […]. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peacefully assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning for you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor […].
	12 Nov 2019 The IC had come to understand... The IC had come to understand the rules of our system better than the people who had created it, and they used that knowledge to their advantage. They’d hacked the Constitution.
	12 Nov 2019 This led to the practice... This led to the practice called LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysys used the agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection - reading their emails, listening on their phone calls, and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only the dumbest analysts were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in any type of surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade, none in the agency’s history had been sentenced to even a day in prison for the crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly prosecute them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you refuse to admit the existence of the system itself.
	12 Nov 2019 Diverse motives and approaches... Diverse motives and approaches can only improve the chances of achieving a common goal.
	12 Nov 2019 Would you rather let your coworkers... Would you rather let your coworkers hang out at your home alone for an hour, or let them spend even just ten minutes alone with your unlocked phone?
	12 Nov 2019 I was suprised to be reminded... I was surprised to be reminded that fully 50 percent of the Bill of Rights, the document’s first ten amendments, were intended to make the job of law enforcement harder. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendmendts were all deliberately, carefully designed to create inefficiencies and hamper the government’s ability to exercise its power and conduct surveillance.
	12 Nov 2019 The better you can understand... The better you can understand a program’s mechanics, the better you can understand its potential for abuse.
	12 Nov 2019 In an authoritarian state... 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. […] It’s this clash, between the authoritarian and the liberal democratic, that I believe to be the major ideological conflict of my time - not some concocted, prejudiced notion of an East-West divide, or a resurrected crusade against Christendom or Islam.
	12 Nov 2019 America's fundamental laws... Americas’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy.
	12 Nov 2019 I wondered whether this would be... I wondered whether this would be the final but grotesque fulfillment of the original American promise that all citizens would be equal before the law: an equality of oppression through total automated law enforcement.