It was with great bitterness that I watched as Snowden was completely forsaken by Europe and driven into the arms of Vladimir Putin. Was it not paradoxical that, after risking his life to reveal a monstrous threat to democracy like the NSA’s program of mass surveillance, he could escape Chelsea Manning’s fate only by going into exile in an authoritarian country? What Snowden had revealed was of exceptional public interest; indeed, his revelations continue to be a wake-up call for our democracies. As Daniel Ellsberg would later explain to me: „We could be East Germany from one day to the next, and have a police state that the East Germans couldn’t even dream of, because they didn’t have this kind of capability then. We don’t have that yet, because they [the NSA and the U.S. intelligence agencies] haven’t used the information they are collecting, but they have the private information […] and that means, as Snowden has put it, we’re a ‚turnkey tyranny‘: in other words, turn a switch, and we could be a total police state.”

—Stefania Maurizi, Secret Power, (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 169-170.

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