The Guardian has published Arundhati Roy’s account of her recent meeting with Edward Snowden in Moscow, along with Daniel Ellsberg and John Cusack. The entire article is a great read, but I was struck especially by this quote from Snowden about the surveillance state.
If we do nothing, we sort of sleepwalk into a total surveillance state where we have both a super-state that has unlimited capacity to apply force with an unlimited ability to know (about the people it is targeting) – and that’s a very dangerous combination. That’s the dark future. The fact that they know everything about us and we know nothing about them – because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class… the elite class, the political class, the resource class – we don’t know where they live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends are. They have the ability to know all that about us. This is the direction of the future, but I think there are changing possibilities in this.
Read Roy’s Account: Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack | The Guardian