Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files. In this searing talk he exposes the challenges of privacy in a digital world and attacks the CEOs of Google and Facebook for their stance. He makes a strong case for why you need to care […]
Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files. In this searing talk he exposes the challenges of privacy in a digital world and attacks the CEOs of Google and Facebook for their stance. He makes a strong case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide.”
Watch his full TED speech here:
A common defence for government surveillance programmes is that they only negatively affect people who have something to hide- but is this really true?
In a recent TED Talk, Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first published documents leaked by Edward Snowden, made the case that the government’s invasions of privacy have a much broader effect than catching and curtailing terrorist or criminal activity.
Greenwald argued the people who claim they have nothing to hide don’t actually mean it. He pointed to Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as examples of powerful people who previously defended government and corporate invasions of privacy but have also taken steps — refused to talk to some media, or bought massive properties to make outside snooping more difficult — to protect themselves from peering eyes.
“A society in which people can be monitored at all times is a society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission, which is why every tyrant – the most overt to the most subtle – craves that system,” Greenwald said. “Conversely even more importantly, it is a realm of privacy, the ability to go somewhere where we can think and reason and interact and speak without the judgemental eyes of others being cast upon us in which creativity and exploration and dissent exclusively reside. And that is why when we allow a society to exist in which we are subject to constant monitoring, we allow the essence of human freedom to be severely crippled.”
As part of his speech, Greenwald devised a challenge for people that tell him they don’t worry about their privacy because they have nothing to hide: He asks them to send him all their email passwords and allow him to look through and publish anything he finds interesting. “After all, if you’re not a bad person, if you’re doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide,” Greenwald quipped. “Not a single person has taken me up on that offer.”
Greenwald pointed to research that found people are much more likely to conform — and therefore less likely to challenge authority, even when such protests are warranted — if they know they’re being watched by others.
“Even if you’re somebody who decides you never want to [challenge authority], the fact that there are other people who are willing to and able to resist and be adversarial to those in power — dissidents and journalists and activists and a whole range of others — is something that brings us all collective good that we should want to preserve,” Greenwald said. “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.”
