It's important that we elevate and primarily focus on the rights of American citizens, but it's also important that we don't forget, 95 percent of the world's population lives beyond our own borders.
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the diminishing concept of privacy for future generations due to advancements in technology and surveillance.
Edward Snowden's quote reflects a significant concern regarding the erosion of privacy in the digital age. As technology continues to evolve, the experiences and expectations of privacy for those born today will differ drastically from previous generations, leading to a societal shift where the notion of personal privacy may become almost nonexistent. This raises important questions about security, freedom, and the implications of living in a highly monitored world.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about data privacy laws, this quote can serve as a powerful reminder of our evolving relationship with privacy.
More from Edward Snowden
All quotes βI think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal.
Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?
Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him... the better off we all are.
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.
I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can't allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I'm not going to be part of that.
Similar quotes
When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.
If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch. Ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other. That's why 'average is over.'
Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.
You don't have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.
It is dangerously destabilizing to have half the world on the cutting edge of technology while the other half struggles on the bare edge of survival.
One of the symptoms of an absence of innovation is the fact that you lose your jobs. Everyone else catches up with you. They can do what you do better than you or cheaper than you. And in a multinational corporate-free market enterprise, it is the company's obligation to take the factory to a place where they can make it more cheaply.