“Privacy is the right of billions of individuals to not be surveilled. Secrecy is the power of the very few to escape accountability, to have no transparency.
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Privacy is a human right and secrecy is a privilege of power, and we need to be in a world where we have complete, ultimate, strong privacy for the billions of people. Because that is a human right, because that is a cornerstone of the freedoms of expression, association, political speech, and all of the other freedoms that are very much attached to privacy. We need to live in a world where secrecy is fickle and easily pierced, where power has to face accountability because they are under the spotlight of transparency. We need to flip the system upside down.
One of my favorite words is a French word: sousveillance. It is the opposite of surveillance. Surveillance means to look from above; sousveillance means to look from below. In their dream of nation-states controlling all of our financial futures, they made one major miscalculation. It's a hell of a lot harder for a few hundred thousand people to watch 7 1/2 billion. But what do you think happens when 7 1/2 billion of us stare back? When the panopticon turns around? When our financial systems, our communication systems, are private, and secrecy is an illusion that can't be sustained? When crimes committed in the names of states and powerful corporations are vulnerable to hackers and whistleblowers and leakers? When everything eventually comes out?”
