Top 12 Most Fascinating Takeaways from Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald’s Reddit AMA

Q: Mr. Snowden, do you feel that your worst fear is being realized, that most people don’t care about their privacy?

Thank you, Mr. Greenwald for the works you’ve written on this subject. No Place to Hide was fantastic. Mr. Snowden, thank you for standing up for what you believe in, even in the face of extreme adversity. Ms. Poitras, thank you for the work you do and the things you create despite similar scrutiny. The world is better by having the three of you, and congratulations on the win.

Snowden: To answer the question, I don’t. Poll after poll is confirming that, contrary to what we tend to think, people not only care, they care a lot. The problem is we feel dis-empowered. We feel like we can’t do anything about it, so we may as well not try.

It’s going to be a long process, but that’s starting to change. The technical community (and a special shout-out to every underpaid and overworked student out there working on this—you are the noble Atlas lifting up the globe in our wildly inequitable current system) is in a lot of way left holding the bag on this one by virtue of the nature of the problems, but that’s not all bad. 2013, for a lot of engineers and researchers, was a kind of atomic moment for computer science. Much like physics post-Manhattan project, an entire field of research that was broadly apolitical realized that work intended to improve the human condition could also be subverted to degrade it.

Politicians and the powerful have indeed got a hell of a head start on us, but equality of awareness is a powerful equalizer. In almost every jurisdiction you see officials scrambling to grab for new surveillance powers now not because they think they’re necessary—even government reports say mass surveillance doesn’t work—but because they think it’s their last chance.

Maybe I’m an idealist, but I think they’re right. In twenty years’ time, the paradigm of digital communications will have changed entirely, and so too with the norms of mass surveillance.