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Precarious privacy

This excerpt from the surveillance expert’s account of Surveillance after Snowden asks whether societies that permit mass surveillance at the expense of privacy are undermining the very possibility of politics.

By David Lyon
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Snowden masks. Mike Herbst/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Your rights matter because you never know when you’re going to need them.

Edward Snowden, March 2014

Let me tell you about Faisal Gill. He is a patriotic American, a Republican, served in the Navy, had high-level security clearance when he worked for the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, works in his community, sent his children to a Catholic school, is a lawyer. It was revealed by Edward Snowden through Glenn Greenwald on 9 July 2014 that the NSA and the FBI have been covertly monitoring his emails under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0