Notes

IV. How it affected People - Technologists have worked tirelessly to re-engineer the security of the devices that surround us Basic technical safeguards such as encryption — once considered esoteric and unnecessary — are now enabled by default in the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private. Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the arbitrary passage of anti-privacy laws.

A. It changed the way people around the world viewed the reliability of any statements made by US officials and transformed relations between countries.

1. It triggered the first global debate about the value of individual privacy in the digital age and prompted challenges to America’s hegemonic control over the Internet.

2. Within the United States, it gave rise to an ideologically diverse, trans-partisan coalition pushing for meaningful reform of the surveillance

B. The United Nations declared mass surveillance an unambiguous violation of human rights and the N.S.A.’s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress.

1. Within days, the United States government responded by bringing charges against me under World War I-era espionage laws. The journalists were advised by lawyers that they risked arrest or subpoena if they returned to the United States. Politicians raced to condemn our efforts as un-American, even treasonous.

2. The mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act was ended.