What had never occurred to me, until I sat in front of his open email account, is how objectionable I find that attitude. Every one of us is entrusted with information that our family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances would rather that we kept private, and while there is no absolute obligation for us to comply with their wishes—there are, indeed, times when we have a moral obligation to speak out in order to defend other goods—assigning the privacy of others a value of zero is callous.
.. Dyer is an honest man committing to an ethical code he believes to be righteous. He is trying to make the world better. He doesn’t believe people should have a right to privacy, so he is ceding his own. These traits and impulses are worthy of some respect.
.. But I will also understand more fully that if someone truly has “nothing to hide,” it means that they also have insufficient regard for the comfort, preferences, and desires of people who feel differently. With funding, Dyer will go forward with his project, and his camera crew will inevitably make people uncomfortable every time that he enters a public bathroom or a medical clinic, or when his child wants to share a traumatic experience with his or her father. The world he wants to create is one where there would be no option to refrain from revealing to colleagues that you’ll have hemorrhoids surgery while on vacation; where girls going through puberty could only talk to their mothers about getting their periods in public; and where every time a potential romantic partner rejects you, it happens for all to see. Think of everyone who has ever kept a confidence you bestowed in a moment of need or vulnerability. All of them had this in common: They had something to hide.
Wired Interview: Edward Snowden
Physically, very few people have seen him since he disappeared into Moscow’s airport complex last June. But he has nevertheless maintained a presence on the world stage—not only as a man without a country but as a man without a body. When being interviewed at the South by Southwest conference or receiving humanitarian awards, his disembodied image smiles down from jumbotron screens. For an interview at the TED conference in March, he went a step further—a small screen bearing a live image of his face was placed on two leg-like poles attached vertically to remotely controlled wheels, giving him the ability to “walk” around the event, talk to people, and even pose for selfies with them. The spectacle suggests a sort of Big Brother in reverse: Orwell’s Winston Smith, the low-ranking party functionary, suddenly dominating telescreens throughout Oceania with messages promoting encryption and denouncing encroachments on privacy.
.. And there’s another prospect that further complicates matters: Some of the revelations attributed to Snowden may not in fact have come from him but from another leaker spilling secrets under Snowden’s name.
.. If other leakers exist within the NSA, it would be more than another nightmare for the agency—it would underscore its inability to control its own information and might indicate that Snowden’s rogue protest of government overreach has inspired others within the intelligence community.
.. Soon after Snowden revealed himself as a leaker, there was enormous media focus on the fact that he quit school after the 10th grade, with the implication that he was simply an uneducated slacker. But rather than delinquency, it was a bout of mononucleosis that caused him to miss school for almost nine months. Instead of falling back a grade, Snowden enrolled in community college.
British Surveillance: Used as Testing Ground
Because it has fewer restrictions, British intelligence platforms “are used as a testing ground” for programs of all five intelligence partners, a group referred to as “Five Eyes,” which includes Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
Frum: Russia Has Become Dangerous Again
The human mind is constituted in such a way that what we don’t wish to believe, we can for a long time disbelieve. “The Cold War is over,” German chancellor Angela Merkel reproached the United States, when the NSA was caught surveilling German communications. But the NSA was surveilling precisely to monitor how deeply Russian espionage had penetrated the German state—because while the Cold War has ended, the security threat from Russia has not.