Incredible Snowden

I'm very impressed by Edward Snowden. Beyond being the whistleblower who made us aware of the mass surveillance carried out through digital technologies, this then very young former NSA analyst has also developed real, substantive thinking on the complex questions of surveillance, privacy, and how to balance them within a democracy.

A quote from 2014 already showed the depth of this thinking, which Snowden would later expand on in his book Permanent Record. Here's that quote:

La version originale

When people say, “I have nothing to hide,” what they’re saying is, “My rights don’t matter.” Because you don’t need to justify your rights as a citizen—that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, “I don’t need them in this context” or “I can’t understand this,” they are no longer rights. You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You’ve converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.