Extracts - Citizen Four

Edward Snowden

I remember what the Internet was like before it was being watched. And there has never been anything in the history of man like it. I mean you could have children from one part of the world having an equal discussion, where you know they were sort of 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 the time. And it was free and unrestrained.

And we’ve seen the chilling of that, the cooling of that and the changing of that model towards something which people self police their own views. And they literally make their own jokes on ending up on the list if they donate to a political cause or if they say something in a discussion. And it has become an expectation that we’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 imprisonment 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 to the good of others.

These are public issues, these are not my issues you know these are everybody’s issues, I’m not afraid of you, you know, you’re not gonna bully me in the silence like you’ve done to everybody else and if no body else is gonna do it I will and hopefully when I’m gone whatever you do to me, there will be somebody else who will do the same thing. It will be the sort of Internet principle you know, of the Hydra: you can stop one person but there is gonna be seven more of us.

Ladar Levison

My service was designed to remove me from the possibility of being forced to violate a person’s privacy. Quite simply Lavabit was designed to remove the service provider from the equation, by not having logs on my server and not having access to a person’s emails on disk, I wasn’t elimitating the possibility of surveillance, I was simply removing myself from that equation. And that surveillance would have to be conducted on the target either the sender or the receiver of the messages. But I was approached by the FBI quite recently, and told that because I couldn’t turn over the information from that one particular user, I would be forced to give up those SSL keys and let the FBI collect every communication on my network without any kind of transparency. And of course, I wasn’t comfortable with that, to say the least! More disturbing was the fact that I couldn’t even tell anybody that it was going on. So I decided: “If I didn’t win the fight to unseal my case, if I didn’t win the battle to be able to tell people what was going on, then my only ethical choice left was to shutdown”. Think about that.

I believe in the rule of law, I believe in the need to conduct investigations, but those investigations are supposed to be difficult for a reason. It’s supposed to be difficult to invade somebody’s privacy. Because of how intrusive it is, because of how disruptive it is. If we can’t, if we don’t have a right to privacy, how do we have a free and open discussion? What good is the right to free speech, if it’s not protected, in a sense that you can’t have a private discussion with somebody else about something you disagree with. Think about the chilling effect that that has. Think about the chilling effect it does have on countries that don’t have a right to privacy.

Jacob Appelbaum

I’ve noticed a really interesting discussion point which is that what people used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And we say in the same breath 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. There is this myth of the passive surveillance machine but actually what is surveillance except control? This notion that the NSA are passive this is nonsense what we see is that they actively attack European citizens, American citizens and, in fact, anyone that they can if they perceive an advantage.