If Surveilance Was About Terrorism....

If mass surveillance was simply about thwarting terrorism, its targets would not consistently be political dissidents, Snowden argued, pointing to the famous ‘I have a dream’ speech by Martin Luther King Jr — described by Snowden as the “greatest civil rights leader my country has ever seen.”

Two days after that speech, Snowden said, the FBI assessed King to be “the greatest threat to national security” at the time.

Little has changed since then.

The former intelligence contractor pointed out that Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, has unlawfully spied on human rights groups like Amnesty International, journalists, media figures and other NGOs, “using powers passed publicly to thwart terrorists.”

Citing the top secret documents he had leaked, he noted that internal justification for keeping such programmes classified made no reference to national security issues. Instead, the documents said that “publicising them would lead to a ‘damaging public debate’ because we [the public] would protest these activities.”

The implication is that the national security state sees the very fundamentals of vibrant democracies — a truly free press, vigorous public debate, oversight over highly classified intelligence policies — as the enemy.

The dismissal of the importance of rights of privacy, Snowden said, is a function of unequal power. The whistleblower urged his listeners to consider how the demand to eliminate privacy comes from powerful people “in a position of privilege… If you’re an old white guy at the top of the pyramid, society is ordered to protect your interests. You designed the system to protect your interests.”

This inequality in power, Snowden said, means that “it’s the minorities who are most at risk” from the impact of mass surveillance.

“It’s not enough to think about these things, it’s not enough to believe in something,” concluded Snowden to resounding applause. “You have to actually stand for something, you have to actually say something, you have to actually risk something, if you want things to get better.”

“At the end of the day, we have to make a decision. Do we want to be a controlled society? Or do we want to live in a free one? Because we can’t have both.”

“Privacy is the right from which all others are derived. Without privacy there is only society, only the collective, which makes them all be and think alike. You can’t have anything yourself, you can’t have your own opinions, unless you have a space that belongs only to you.

Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say…”

“We need to think about how we got here. We talk about legal reform, but these weren’t authorised in the first place… Reforming things within the system is the ideal, within the system. It’s the way it should work, the way our societies are designed to function.

What happens when the systems fail to function?

We have this natural inclination to think that these are departures from the natural order of things, and everything will be better again, and we can rely once more on the system.

But, it turns out, that abuse is the byproduct of power… Whenever we have increasingly small groups with power, we have abuses of power. The mechanism today is technology…

There’s an intersection of technology and access to information in society. The internet is the shorthand for it… It increasingly effects all of us, but we have less and less control over it.”

“We have to accept that the only way to protect the rights of one, is to protect the rights of all,” said Snowden. “Increasingly this is seen as a threat to government because it represents a domain in which they will no longer be able to intervene.”

“Politicians are consumed by the ease of fear in messaging. Saying ‘this will save lives’ is persuasive to the voter. People are inclined to believe them…Let’s look at the actual facts, at 9/11. We had a Congressional investigation — and they found that it wasn’t the case we weren’t collecting enough. The problem was our focus was so scattered, so many programmes collecting so much, we didn’t share it properly, and because of that, 3,000 people died. Politicians today are saying we need to collect more — but they’re making us all less safe, and putting lives at risk.”