 I'm Corey Doctorow and I'm here at San Diego Comic Con and I want to say a few words to you about privacy and prism. You know, we have a tendency to forget that privacy isn't the same as secrecy, right? I know what you do when you go to the bathroom, it's not a secret, but it takes a pretty special person to want to do it with a stall door open all the time. You know, I know what your parents did to make you, it takes a pretty special kind of person to want to do it in public all the time. You know, it's not the thing that privacy and secrecy are the same. Privacy and secrecy are totally different things and the right to decide which of your private things you're going to make public is an important part of your right to have intellectual freedom. And intellectual freedom is another dimension of privacy and prism that I think we should be paying attention to, especially if you're the kind of person who comes to Comic Con. You know, Comic Con isn't just about comics, it's also about people expressing all kinds of amazing things about themselves. They dress up, some people are very gender-fluid, you see a lot of people in what would be historically called cross-dressing. And historically, comics have been a medium where being a fan of it would be a strike against you, right? Like anything from getting you fired to getting you passed over for a promotion to having their nose turned up at you. And yet people who were able to nurture their secret habit for comics were able to build that thing that was once shameful into something this big, you know, this 200,000 people conference that has spin-offs all over the world and has become an important part of our culture. That would never happen if everything that you cared about had to be made public without your choice immediately. Now, you may be thinking, here I am, I don't have any secrets, nothing's wrong with me, I don't care if you know what I do, but you're lucky, right? You probably have friends, people you love, people you care about, who either today or at some point in their life had secrets that did matter to them, things like their sexual orientation, the fact that they had a disease, their religious beliefs or lack thereof. And at some point in their life, if those had been disclosed without their permission, it would have redounded on them with enormous consequences. So yes, by all means, celebrate your own privilege and luck in having a skeleton-free closet, but don't insist that the people who don't have something wrong with them. I think we need the right to choose when we make ourselves public. And that that's the basis of a free and fair society. And if there's one thing that the Prism revelations have done for us, the NSA revelations have done for us, it's shown the extent to which the spies in this country just lack adult supervision in any sense that there is proportionality in who you spy on and when you spy on them. They, with their own glorious skeleton-free closets, they who have never had to be ashamed of being part of the mainstream, they don't understand what it means to have one day, at one point in your life, had something where if it had been disclosed against your will, it would have been enormously harmful to you and how being able to choose when you disclose that meant the difference between a life lived in shame and a life glorying in what makes you you.