Thread by @SarahJamieLewis

Privacy is a human right. Encryption is a human right. No qualifiers. No ifs or buts; No reservations or restrictions.

The surveillance culture we have created is immoral. No amount of good done with surveillance makes up for the evil that surveillance itself causes.

Surveillance is a black hole. Surveillance is self destructive. The idea that if we can simply "observe" more of the ("bad") behavior we can do something about it is morally flawed, and it will eat away at those who try until everything they were trying to protect is gone.

I refuse to let this debate go back 20 years. There is no tension between "encryption and security". Encryption is Security. Privacy is fundamental to Security.

Privacy is a moral, individual right.

Also...Privacy is Consent. They are the same thing. Queer Privacy is free now go read it.

leanpub.com/queerprivacy

Privacy Enhancing Technologies allow people to level the playing field and enforce their consent. They provide people the freedom to explore the world on their terms. They allow people to come out and connect with strangers, to escape & rebuild, to recover, to breath.

The world is dark and full of terrors, what else is new. We're hurtling towards economic and planetary crises in a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.

Protecting, and more importantly normalizing, the right to privacy in such a world is of critical importance.

Those who cry about the harms done in a world with encryption, deliberately ignore the terrors that would become rituals in a world without.

Because the hardest pill to swallow is that allowing people to hide from their government is our last defense against tyranny.

Privacy isn't good despite the fact that people do evil things. Privacy is good *because* of the fact that people do evil things.

History is has clear record: surveillance is an evil that breeds worse evils.

Never let them tell you that privacy is dead because they will try to make you believe that consent is dead.

If you believe that consent is dead you will allow them to do horrid things.

Don't believe their bullshit. Enforce consent. Make them ask nicely. Tell them to fuck off.

While I'm getting all my good privacy takes out:

If you define privacy by how much a government is willing to protect you from a corporation, or how much a court is willing to protect you from a state, you are going to end up with less and less privacy.

Privacy is not a bounded right. Privacy is a not a societal privilege. Regulation doesn't end surveillance, it is only a battle for who is permitted to surveil you.

In recent centuries the state has grown increasingly accustomed to using surveillance to condemn those they found fucking the wrong sort of people, or smoking the wrong sort of plant, or praying to the wrong sort of god or other ridiculous oppressions.

Also please donate to @OpenPriv, we need a new generation of privacy technologies & research, designed by and for people from communities who are most impacted by censorship and surveillance.

openprivacy.ca