Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters, TEDGlobal 2014 |
A lot of times when people make accusations like that about other people - "Oh, he can't really be doing this for principled reasons, he must have some corrupt, nefarious reason" - they're saying a lot more about themselves than they are the target of their accusations, because those people, the ones who make that accusation, they themselves never act for any reason other than corrupt reasons, so they assume that everybody else is plagued by the same disease of soullessness as they are, and so that's the assumption.
We can try and render the chains of mass surveillance invisible or undetectable, but the constraints that it imposes on us do not become any less potent.
The measure of how free a society is is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens, but how it treats its dissidents and those who resist orthodoxy.