Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters

There is an entire genre of YouTube videos

devoted to an experience which

I am certain that everyone in this room has had.

It entails an individual who,

thinking they're alone,

engages in some expressive behavior —

wild singing, gyrating dancing,

some mild sexual activity —

only to discover that, in fact, they are not alone,

that there is a person watching and lurking,

the discovery of which causes them

to immediately cease what they were doing

in horror.

The sense of shame and humiliation

in their face is palpable.

It's the sense of,

"This is something I'm willing to do

only if no one else is watching."

This is the crux of the work

on which I have been singularly focused

for the last 16 months,

the question of why privacy matters,

a question that has arisen

in the context of a global debate,

enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden

that the United States and its partners,

unbeknownst to the entire world,

has converted the Internet,

once heralded as an unprecedented tool

of liberation and democratization,

into an unprecedented zone

of mass, indiscriminate surveillance.

There is a very common sentiment

that arises in this debate,

even among people who are uncomfortable

with mass surveillance, which says

that there is no real harm

that comes from this large-scale invasion

because only people who are engaged in bad acts

have a reason to want to hide

and to care about their privacy.

This worldview is implicitly grounded

in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world,

good people and bad people.

Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks

or who engage in violent criminality

and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing,

have reasons to care about their privacy.

But by contrast, good people

are people who go to work,

come home, raise their children, watch television.

They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks

but to read the news or exchange recipes

or to plan their kids' Little League games,

and those people are doing nothing wrong

and therefore have nothing to hide

and no reason to fear

the government monitoring them.

The people who are actually saying that

are engaged in a very extreme act

of self-deprecation.

What they're really saying is,

"I have agreed to make myself

such a harmless and unthreatening

and uninteresting person that I actually don't fear

having the government know what it is that I'm doing."

This mindset has found what I think

is its purest expression

in a 2009 interview with

the longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who,

when asked about all the different ways his company

is causing invasions of privacy

for hundreds of millions of people around the world,

said this: He said,

"If you're doing something that you don't want

other people to know,

maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Now, there's all kinds of things to say about

that mentality,

the first of which is that the people who say that,

who say that privacy isn't really important,

they don't actually believe it,

and the way you know that they don't actually believe it

is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn't matter,

with their actions, they take all kinds of steps

to safeguard their privacy.

They put passwords on their email

and their social media accounts,

they put locks on their bedroom

and bathroom doors,

all steps designed to prevent other people

from entering what they consider their private realm

and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know.

The very same Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google,

ordered his employees at Google

to cease speaking with the online

Internet magazine CNET

after CNET published an article

full of personal, private information

about Eric Schmidt,

which it obtained exclusively through Google searches

and using other Google products. (Laughter)

This same division can be seen

with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg,

who in an infamous interview in 2010

pronounced that privacy is no longer

a "social norm."

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife

purchased not only their own house

but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto

for a total of 30 million dollars

in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy

that prevented other people from monitoring

what they do in their personal lives.

Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world,

every single time somebody has said to me,

"I don't really worry about invasions of privacy

because I don't have anything to hide."

I always say the same thing to them.

I get out a pen, I write down my email address.

I say, "Here's my email address.

What I want you to do when you get home

is email me the passwords

to all of your email accounts,

not just the nice, respectable work one in your name,

but all of them,

because I want to be able to just troll through

what it is you're doing online,

read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting.

After all, if you're not a bad person,

if you're doing nothing wrong,

you should have nothing to hide."

Not a single person has taken me up on that offer.

I check and — (Applause)

I check that email account religiously all the time.

It's a very desolate place.

And there's a reason for that,

which is that we as human beings,

even those of us who in words

disclaim the importance of our own privacy,

instinctively understand

the profound importance of it.

It is true that as human beings, we're social animals,

which means we have a need for other people

to know what we're doing and saying and thinking,

which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online.

But equally essential to what it means

to be a free and fulfilled human being

is to have a place that we can go

and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people.

There's a reason why we seek that out,

and our reason is that all of us —

not just terrorists and criminals, all of us —

have things to hide.

There are all sorts of things that we do and think

that we're willing to tell our physician

or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse

or our best friend that we would be mortified

for the rest of the world to learn.

We make judgments every single day

about the kinds of things that we say and think and do

that we're willing to have other people know,

and the kinds of things that we say and think and do

that we don't want anyone else to know about.

People can very easily in words claim

that they don't value their privacy,

but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief.

Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved

universally and instinctively.

It isn't just a reflexive movement

like breathing air or drinking water.

The reason is that when we're in a state

where we can be monitored, where we can be watched,

our behavior changes dramatically.

The range of behavioral options that we consider

when we think we're being watched

severely reduce.

This is just a fact of human nature

that has been recognized in social science

and in literature and in religion

and in virtually every field of discipline.

There are dozens of psychological studies

that prove that when somebody knows

that they might be watched,

the behavior they engage in

is vastly more conformist and compliant.

Human shame is a very powerful motivator,

as is the desire to avoid it,

and that's the reason why people,

when they're in a state of being watched, make decisions

not that are the byproduct of their own agency

but that are about the expectations

that others have of them

or the mandates of societal orthodoxy.

This realization was exploited most powerfully

for pragmatic ends by the 18th- century philosopher Jeremy Bentham,

who set out to resolve an important problem

ushered in by the industrial age,

where, for the first time, institutions had become

so large and centralized

that they were no longer able to monitor

and therefore control each one of their individual members,

and the solution that he devised

was an architectural design

originally intended to be implemented in prisons

that he called the panopticon,

the primary attribute of which was the construction

of an enormous tower in the center of the institution

where whoever controlled the institution

could at any moment watch any of the inmates,

although they couldn't watch all of them at all times.

And crucial to this design

was that the inmates could not actually

see into the panopticon, into the tower,

and so they never knew

if they were being watched or even when.

And what made him so excited about this discovery

was that that would mean that the prisoners

would have to assume that they were being watched

at any given moment,

which would be the ultimate enforcer

for obedience and compliance.

The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault

realized that that model could be used

not just for prisons but for every institution

that seeks to control human behavior:

schools, hospitals, factories, workplaces.

And what he said was that this mindset,

this framework discovered by Bentham,

was the key means of societal control

for modern, Western societies,

which no longer need

the overt weapons of tyranny —

punishing or imprisoning or killing dissidents,

or legally compelling loyalty to a particular party —

because mass surveillance creates

a prison in the mind

that is a much more subtle

though much more effective means

of fostering compliance with social norms

or with social orthodoxy,

much more effective

than brute force could ever be.

The most iconic work of literature about surveillance

and privacy is the George Orwell novel "1984,"

which we all learn in school, and therefore it's almost become a cliche.

In fact, whenever you bring it up in a debate about surveillance,

people instantaneously dismiss it

as inapplicable, and what they say is,

"Oh, well in '1984,' there were monitors in people's homes,

they were being watched at every given moment,

and that has nothing to do with the surveillance state that we face."

That is an actual fundamental misapprehension

of the warnings that Orwell issued in "1984."

The warning that he was issuing

was about a surveillance state

not that monitored everybody at all times,

but where people were aware that they could

be monitored at any given moment.

Here is how Orwell's narrator, Winston Smith,

described the surveillance system

that they faced:

"There was, of course, no way of knowing

whether you were being watched at any given moment."

He went on to say,

"At any rate, they could plug in your wire

whenever they wanted to.

You had to live, did live,

from habit that became instinct,

in the assumption that every sound you made

was overheard and except in darkness

every movement scrutinized."

The Abrahamic religions similarly posit

that there's an invisible, all-knowing authority

who, because of its omniscience,

always watches whatever you're doing,

which means you never have a private moment,

the ultimate enforcer

for obedience to its dictates.

What all of these seemingly disparate works

recognize, the conclusion that they all reach,

is that 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.

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 judgmental eyes of others being cast upon us,

in which creativity and exploration

and dissent exclusively reside,

and that is the reason why,

when we allow a society to exist

in which we're subject to constant monitoring,

we allow the essence of human freedom

to be severely crippled.

The last point I want to observe about this mindset,

the idea that only people who are doing something wrong

have things to hide and therefore reasons to care about privacy,

is that it entrenches two very destructive messages,

two destructive lessons,

the first of which is that

the only people who care about privacy,

the only people who will seek out privacy,

are by definition bad people.

This is a conclusion that we should have

all kinds of reasons for avoiding,

the most important of which is that when you say,

"somebody who is doing bad things,"

you probably mean things like plotting a terrorist attack

or engaging in violent criminality,

a much narrower conception

of what people who wield power mean

when they say, "doing bad things."

For them, "doing bad things" typically means

doing something that poses meaningful challenges

to the exercise of our own power.

The other really destructive

and, I think, even more insidious lesson

that comes from accepting this mindset

is there's an implicit bargain

that people who accept this mindset have accepted,

and that bargain is this:

If you're willing to render yourself

sufficiently harmless,

sufficiently unthreatening

to those who wield political power,

then and only then can you be free

of the dangers of surveillance.

It's only those who are dissidents,

who challenge power,

who have something to worry about.

There are all kinds of reasons why we should want to avoid that lesson as well.

You may be a person who, right now,

doesn't want to engage in that behavior,

but at some point in the future you might.

Even if you're somebody who decides

that you never want to,

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.

Equally critical is that the measure

of how free a society is

is not how it treats its good,

obedient, compliant citizens,

but how it treats its dissidents

and those who resist orthodoxy.

But the most important reason

is that a system of mass surveillance

suppresses our own freedom in all sorts of ways.

It renders off-limits

all kinds of behavioral choices

without our even knowing that it's happened.

The renowned socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg

once said, "He who does not move

does not notice his chains."

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.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Bruno Giussani: Glenn, thank you.

The case is rather convincing, I have to say,

but I want to bring you back

to the last 16 months and to Edward Snowden

for a few questions, if you don't mind.

The first one is personal to you.

We have all read about the arrest of your partner,

David Miranda in London, and other difficulties,

but I assume that

in terms of personal engagement and risk,

that the pressure on you is not that easy

to take on the biggest sovereign organizations in the world.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Glenn Greenwald: You know, I think one of the things that happens

is that people's courage in this regard

gets contagious,

and so although I and the other journalists with whom I was working

were certainly aware of the risk —

the United States continues to be the most powerful country in the world

and doesn't appreciate it when you

disclose thousands of their secrets

on the Internet at will —

seeing somebody who is a 29-year-old

ordinary person who grew up in

a very ordinary environment

exercise the degree of principled courage that Edward Snowden risked,

knowing that he was going to go to prison for the rest of his life

or that his life would unravel,

inspired me and inspired other journalists

and inspired, I think, people around the world,

including future whistleblowers,

to realize that they can engage in that kind of behavior as well.

BG: I'm curious about your relationship with Ed Snowden,

because you have spoken with him a lot,

and you certainly continue doing so,

but in your book, you never call him Edward,

nor Ed, you say "Snowden." How come?

GG: You know, I'm sure that's something

for a team of psychologists to examine. (Laughter)

I don't really know. The reason I think that,

one of the important objectives that he actually had,

one of his, I think, most important tactics,

was that he knew that one of the ways

to distract attention from the substance of the revelations

would be to try and personalize the focus on him,

and for that reason, he stayed out of the media.

He tried not to ever have his personal life

subject to examination,

and so I think calling him Snowden

is a way of just identifying him as this important historical actor

rather than trying to personalize him in a way

that might distract attention from the substance.

Moderator: So his revelations, your analysis,

the work of other journalists,

have really developed the debate,

and many governments, for example, have reacted,

including in Brazil, with projects and programs

to reshape a little bit the design of the Internet, etc.

There are a lot of things going on in that sense.

But I'm wondering, for you personally,

what is the endgame?

At what point will you think,

well, actually, we've succeeded in moving the dial?

GG: Well, I mean, the endgame for me as a journalist

is very simple, which is to make sure

that every single document that's newsworthy

and that ought to be disclosed

ends up being disclosed,

and that secrets that should never have been kept in the first place

end up uncovered.

To me, that's the essence of journalism

and that's what I'm committed to doing.

As somebody who finds mass surveillance odious

for all the reasons I just talked about and a lot more,

I mean, I look at this as work that will never end

until governments around the world

are no longer able to subject entire populations

to monitoring and surveillance

unless they convince some court or some entity

that the person they've targeted

has actually done something wrong.

To me, that's the way that privacy can be rejuvenated.

BG: So Snowden is very, as we've seen at TED,

is very articulate in presenting and portraying himself

as a defender of democratic values

and democratic principles.

But then, many people really find it difficult to believe

that those are his only motivations.

They find it difficult to believe

that there was no money involved,

that he didn't sell some of those secrets,

even to China and to Russia,

which are clearly not the best friends

of the United States right now.

And I'm sure many people in the room

are wondering the same question.

Do you consider it possible there is

that part of Snowden we've not seen yet?

GG: No, I consider that absurd and idiotic.

(Laughter) If you wanted to,

and I know you're just playing devil's advocate,

but if you wanted to sell

secrets to another country,

which he could have done and become

extremely rich doing so,

the last thing you would do is take those secrets

and give them to journalists and ask journalists to publish them,

because it makes those secrets worthless.

People who want to enrich themselves

do it secretly by selling secrets to the government,

but I think there's one important point worth making,

which is, that accusation comes from

people in the U.S. government,

from people in the media who are loyalists

to these various governments,

and I think a lot of times when people make accusations like that about other people —

"Oh, he can't really be doing this

for principled reasons,

he must have some corrupt, nefarious reason" —

they're saying a lot more about themselves

than they are the target of their accusations,

because — (Applause) —

those people, the ones who make that accusation,

they themselves never act

for any reason other than corrupt reasons,

so they assume

that everybody else is plagued by the same disease

of soullessness as they are,

and so that's the assumption.

(Applause)

BG: Glenn, thank you very much. GG: Thank you very much.

BG: Glenn Greenwald.

(Applause)