Overflight, 101

«I’ve noticed a really interesting discussion point which is, what people used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And we say, in the same breathe that privacy is dead. This is something that really concerns me about my generation, especially when we talk about how we’re not surprised by anything. I think that we should consider that when we lose privacy we lose agency, we lose liberty itself, because we no longer feel free to express what we think.» Jacob Appelbaum, at the 2013 hearings of the European Parliament to investigate NSA surveillance on EU citizens and companies
«I remember what the Internet was like before its being watched, and there’s never been anything in the history of Man that’s like it. I mean, you could, again, you can have children from one part of the world have an equal discussion where, you know, they were granted the same respect for their ideas and conversation with experts in the field from another part of the world on any topic anywhere anytime, all of the time. And it was free and unrestrained. And we’ve seen the chilling of that, the cooling of that, the changing of that model towards something in which people self−police their own views and they literally make jokes about ending up on "the list" if they donate to a political cause or if they say something in a discussion. And it’s become an expectation they’re being watched. Many people I’ve talked to have mentioned that they’re careful about what they type into search engines because they know that it’s being recorded, and that limits the boundaries of their intellectual exploration. And I’m more willing to risk inprisonment or any other negative outcome personally than I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me, whom I care for equally as I do for myself. And again that’s not to say that I’m self−sacrificing, because it gives me, I feel good in my human experience to know that I can contribute the good of others.» Edward Snowden, commenting with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill

Overflight