Reflections on TED Talks and Privacy

Reflecting on the TED talks by both Alessandro Acquisti and Glenn Greenwald, I have a lot of feelings. Privacy has always been an important issue for me. My senior project in high-school was entirely about NSA spying, and the final product was a P2P encrypted messaging service based on WebRTC (PeerJS). This project was produced in the midst of the Snowden revelations as well, so the most heinous grievances I had cataloged in the presentation itself were out of date shortly after I graduated. Privacy is important. There are arguments against highly isolated and encrypted systems for the sake of keeping user information secret, but they mostly all fall flat; “I have nothing to hide”, etc. Any idyllic society is only made possible alongside citizen privacy. Peering into people’s private, personal lives in an effort to isolate terrorists from the populous has by-and-large been a laughable exercise. The number of shootings in recent years with public signals of their occurrence posted on social media hasn’t even been enough to mitigate terrorism. The legal precedent for all of this, the PATRIOT Act, was passed by a Congress gripped by fear, urgency, and self-preservation. America was taken advantage of during a time of strife by a select few in order to facilitate the funding of mass-spying infrastructure and set the stage for an Orwellian nightmare. Privacy is the prime vector of revolution. The second amendment isn’t relevant if your revolution is in cleartext.

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