Even though we may focus first on the rights of our own country, that does not mean that we should disregard the rights of everyone else.
Category Archive: Edward Snowden
I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions.
My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.
After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power – the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government – for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism.
I did not seek to sell U.S. secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.
I don’t see myself as a hero because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.
We’re losing our way as a society. If we don’t stand up, if we don’t say what we think those rights should be, and if we don’t protect them, we will very soon find out that we do not have them.
Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law. And the key there is in terms of civil disobedience. You have to make sure that what you’re risking, what you’re bringing onto yourself, does not serve as a detriment to anyone else. It doesn’t hurt anybody else.
Perhaps I am naive, but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.
That’s the beauty of the Internet is that we’re no longer tied to our communities by physical connections.