Glenn Greenwald spoke tonight at the Japanese Cultural Center, Little Tokyo, downtown Los Angeles. It was amazing. He began by joking that it was the beginning of the American leg of his speaking tour so he was fresh and lucid. That he was. Using notes only when directly quoting the consistently misleading mainstream media -- which paints every story in ways that supports structures of power even when they are feigning that real "objectivity" is possible -- he was vivid, funny, and shocking.
He had only one overarching point to make: Privacy matters, and anyone who says it does not can immediately by shown to not be thinking or to be lying. How? Let's say someone says, "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide." Or better yet, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I've got nothing to hide." Greenwald has a foolproof comeback for that kind of thoughtless and pernicious statement:
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| Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, Metropolitan Books, and KPFK FM (Pacifica Free Speech Radio, Los Angeles). |
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"Oh really? Great. Here's my personal email address, when you get home, I want you to email me all your email, social media, and other passwords. Then I'm going to troll through them for whatever interests me, pick out what I like, and post it in your name for everyone to see." I mean, if you've done nothing wrong then you've got nothing to worry about, right? He's never gotten a reply to his offer, and he's waited by his email many the night. Privacy matters.
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| Google goes "evil" (anorak.co.uk). |
Even Google Corporation's
Eric Schmidt,
whose salary recently doubled, found that out when he said he had "nothing to hide." He then banned everyone working at Google, Inc. from talking to CNET about him or disclosing his
publicly available information as gathered and compiled by Google. Nice going on that "Do no evil" pledge, Google, Chairman Schmidt. It's easy to feel safe when you're helping take away everyone else's safety.
Edward Snowden, NSA, US Surveillance State
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| "Collect it all." How the NSA spies on me |
Greenwald was signing his newest book, No Place to Hide, as well as answering personal questions one on one. Catch him on tour in a town near you. This is history in the making. And with the release of whistleblower and former spy (not merely low level contractor) Ed Snowden's revelations, Greenwald (editor at The Intercept) is making a fearless, incisive, and essential contribution to the world's understanding of the US surveillance state. Tickets were only $6.
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