devoted to an experience which

I am certain that everyone in this room has had.

It entails an individual who,

thinking they're alone,

engages in some expressive behavior —

wild singing, gyrating dancing,

some mild sexual activity —

only to discover that, in fact, they are not alone,

that there is a person watching and lurking,

the discovery of which causes them

to immediately cease what they were doing

in horror.

The sense of shame and humiliation

in their face is palpable.

It's the sense of,

"This is something I'm willing to do

only if no one else is watching."

This is the crux of the work

on which I have been singularly focused

for the last 16 months,

the question of why privacy matters,

a question that has arisen

in the context of a global debate,

enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden

that the United States and its partners,

unbeknownst to the entire world,

has converted the Internet,

once heralded as an unprecedented tool

of liberation and democratization,

into an unprecedented zone

of mass, indiscriminate surveillance.

There is a very common sentiment

that arises in this debate,

even among people who are uncomfortable

with mass surveillance, which says

that there is no real harm

that comes from this large-scale invasion

because only people who are engaged in bad acts

have a reason to want to hide

and to care about their privacy.

This worldview is implicitly grounded

in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world,

good people and bad people.

Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks

or who engage in violent criminality

and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing,

have reasons to care about their privacy.

But by contrast, good people

are people who go to work,

come home, raise their children, watch television.

They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks

but to read the news or exchange recipes

or to plan their kids' Little League games,

and those people are doing nothing wrong

and therefore have nothing to hide

and no reason to fear

the government monitoring them.

The people who are actually saying that

are engaged in a very extreme act

of self-deprecation.

What they're really saying is,

"I have agreed to make myself

such a harmless and unthreatening

and uninteresting person that I actually don't fear

having the government know what it is that I'm doing."

This mindset has found what I think

is its purest expression

in a 2009 interview with

the longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who,

when asked about all the different ways his company

is causing invasions of privacy

for hundreds of millions of people around the world,

said this: He said,

"If you're doing something that you don't want

other people to know,

maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Now, there's all kinds of things to say about

that mentality,

the first of which is that the people who say that,

who say that privacy isn't really important,

they don't actually believe it,

and the way you know that they don't actually believe it

is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn't matter,

with their actions, they take all kinds of steps

to safeguard their privacy.

They put passwords on their email

and their social media accounts,

they put locks on their bedroom

and bathroom doors,

all steps designed to prevent other people

from entering what they consider their private realm

and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know.

The very same Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google,

ordered his employees at Google

to cease speaking with the online

Internet magazine CNET

after CNET published an article

full of personal, private information

about Eric Schmidt,

which it obtained exclusively through Google searches

and using other Google products. (Laughter)

This same division can be seen

with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg,

who in an infamous interview in 2010

pronounced that privacy is no longer

a "social norm."

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife

purchased not only their own house

but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto

for a total of 30 million dollars

in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy

that prevented other people from monitoring

what they do in their personal lives.

Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world,

every single time somebody has said to me,

"I don't really worry about invasions of privacy

because I don't have anything to hide."

I always say the same thing to them.

I get out a pen, I write down my email address.

I say, "Here's my email address.

What I want you to do when you get home

is email me the passwords

to all of your email accounts,

not just the nice, respectable work one in your name,

but all of them,

because I want to be able to just troll through

what it is you're doing online,

read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting.

After all, if you're not a bad person,

if you're doing nothing wrong,

you should have nothing to hide."

Not a single person has taken me up on that offer.

I check and — (Applause)

I check that email account religiously all the time.

It's a very desolate place.

And there's a reason for that,

which is that we as human beings,

even those of us who in words

disclaim the importance of our own privacy,

instinctively understand

the profound importance of it.

It is true that as human beings, we're social animals,

which means we have a need for other people

to know what we're doing and saying and thinking,

which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online.

But equally essential to what it means

to be a free and fulfilled human being

is to have a place that we can go

and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people.

There's a reason why we seek that out,

and our reason is that all of us —

not just terrorists and criminals, all of us —

have things to hide.

There are all sorts of things that we do and think

that we're willing to tell our physician

or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse

or our best friend that we would be mortified

for the rest of the world to learn.

We make judgments every single day

about the kinds of things that we say and think and do

that we're willing to have other people know,

and the kinds of things that we say and think and do

that we don't want anyone else to know about.

People can very easily in words claim

that they don't value their privacy,

but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief.

Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved

universally and instinctively.

It isn't just a reflexive movement

like breathing air or drinking water.

The reason is that when we're in a state

where we can be monitored, where we can be watched,

our behavior changes dramatically.

The range of behavioral options that we consider

when we think we're being watched

severely reduce.