EDIT: wow this came out really long. TLDR: Though I agree with him, I really didn't like most of the arguments Greenwald put forward in this video. What I typed below was my reactions/responses to what he was saying as I watched the video.
I mean I agree with him but hes making really shitty arguments there...
I'm going to restate that right at the top because I know people will ignore it and use it to dismiss me and my arguments. I FULLY AGREE THAT MASS SURVEILLANCE, AS IT IS CURRENTLY PRACTICED BY THE NSA, IS A TERRIBLE/ILLEGAL THING. However, if anything, listening to this talk by Greenwald has made me question that stance. If these are the best arguments our side has, maybe we need to reconsider...
Throwing 'uninteresting' in with 'nonthreatening' to describe how people choose to live their lives is a pointless low-blow.
Saying Erik Schmitt clearly values privacy because he puts locks on his bedroom door and passwords on his email? Or maybe he doesn't want people stealing his stuff/pretending to be him by sending emails from his account. More importantly, there is a massive difference between some faceless organization knowing your secrets and any random person who is interested being able to find out everything about you. Pretending those are the same thing and that Erik was publicly defending total information reveal is a straw man attack and totally baseless.
The Zuckerberg quote. What he actually said was "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." He did not say that privacy is no longer a social norm, though I suppose that is close enough. However, he is talking about norms, and what people WILLINGLY SHARE with others. The fact that he and his wife wanted more privacy from the paparazzi and such has no bearing on the social norms of his costumers. He is not being a hypocrite, he said that other people engage in sharing thoughts and opinions, and he doesn't want to share looking through his bedroom window. Those things are totally different and Greenwald is pretending they make him a hypocrite.
'I ask people who claim this to email me their passwords' (paraphrased). Again, there is a huge difference between faceless corporation/government knowing everything, and some random stranger knowing everything and publishing the juicy bits for everyone.
Yeah he keeps arguing as though the debate is 'everything about your life is in the public domain' vs. 'you have some (any) amount of privacy.' That is not what the debate is. No one is arguing for complete disclosure of everything to the public domain. By pretending that is what the other side is arguing, he is again straw-manning. Incredibly disingenuous.
"people act differently when they know they are being watched" (paraphrase). Ok that is a good point. Though I would still argue there is a difference between being watched by an individual, and being monitored by some overarching software. If these studies he referred to were done where the people knew/suspected a specific individual (the experimenter) was watching them individually, that is totally different from 'one guy with some software is 'watching' 10,000 of you. I wonder if any experiments have addressed that exact question.
oo he should have stuck with the Abrahamic religion part, that was a good connection.
Ok 'the essence of human freedom requires a space where we know we are not being monitored' (paraphrase). That is a much much better point. He totally should have started here, and not with his straw-manning Schmitt and Zuckerberg. Would also be great if he had some evidence to back it up. I mean, in 1984 its not that you are being monitored, its that you are being monitored by someone who would arrest/kill you for saying certain things. Punishments for exercising free speech are totally different from monitoring things. Again, pretending that one innately follows from the other is disingenuous; he is pretending his opponents are arguing 'hey lets all live under big brother,' which is completely untrue and unfair.
ooooo people who wield power are scaarrrrryyy, they don't just care about terrorist attacks but want to stop anyone who wishes to change society in any way, because they are evvviiiilll. Beware the bogeyman watching over your shoulder. Anyone in power will immediately desire to use said power to suppress opponents, so sayeth the Greenwald.
yeah and his final (? maybe not he said final and I'm typing this as I watch) point is much the same. He says that monitoring being put in place FUNDAMENTALLY ENTAILS THAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL USE IT TO STOP ANY FORM OF DISSIDENCE. This is simply not true. I suppose the threat of it happening is always a possibility, but it is not an intrinsic piece of surveillance. For example, suppose that the surveillance was under a totally separate court system that the administrative branch had no control over. Or that the surveillance was done entirely by computers, running open-sourced software. The system being corrupt is a very different issue from the system being inherently evil. In this talk he is constantly conflating the two, and pretending that if the system can be used for evil, the system as a whole is evil and should not exist. Obviously, this is untrue. Take speed limits for instance; clearly they can be abused by local cops to make money off of regular citizens, but they also serve an important societal function when used appropriately.
"A system of mass surveillance suppresses freedoms." NO IT DOESN'T. A system of arresting dissidents, of disappearing politically active people, that suppresses freedom. Surveillance can help a government carry out such a practice. But surveillance does not kill people or otherwise stop them from doing anything, besides the psychological effects he mentioned briefly.
Ok in summary, he had one really really good point; that psychologically, people behave differently when they think they are being monitored (and presumably the way they behave is a mode of living which is less fulfilling). That is a good argument, and he should have stuck with it for the entire talk. The connection to god in Abrahmic religions was superb; that is exactly the role of the doctrine of divine omniscience, it ensures everyone acts 'right' all the time. That point deserved more than one line. Everything else he said in this talk was a completely unfounded straw man or a slippery slope argument, and thus cheapened our position as a whole. Like I said at the beginning, I FULLY BELIEVE THAT NSA SURVEILLANCE IS BAD. But I've never really thought about it that much, and if ad-hominem straw men is the best Greenwald, one of our most prominent personalities, can put forward, maybe I need to rethink my position...