We are creating an architecture of surveillance that is so good that if it gets taken over by a bad government

we are in serious trouble because it will be impossible to resist.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

A brilliant guest we have for you today. She's an associate professor at Oxford University.

And the author of Privacy is Power, a brilliant book.

Karissa Velis, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thank you so much for having me.

It is great to have you on the show. Listen before we get into talking about the subject you cover in your brilliant book.

Just tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey that leads you here to be sitting here talking to us.

I'm a philosopher because I was never good enough at jobs to be a comedian, a lot to be a comedian.

But you know second best is philosopher. And I studied philosophy as a BA, MA, and then PhD.

I was writing my dissertation on something related to ethics but very different.

And then I started researching the history of my family. My family were Spanish refugees in Mexico from the Spanish Civil War.

And they had never talked about the war. It was a very sensitive topic.

And I went into the archives and uncovered so much about them that hadn't told us.

And it made me wonder whether I had a right to know these things that they hadn't told us.

Whether I had a right to tell my family or maybe even publish about it because it was so interesting.

And being a philosopher, I looked into the philosophy of privacy and realized there was a huge gap in the literature.

There was very little written about it. The little that there was was kind of outdated.

And we didn't really address the questions that I was asking myself.

And in that same summer, Snowden came up with his revelations that we were being surveilled at a mass scale.

...