In those intensive months of work on the Snowden case and documents, I traveled to London solely with encrypted memory sticks that did not contain sensitive files. I carried with me only Sandro Pertini’s speeches and letters. If I had been stopped under Schedule 7, like David Miranda, and forced to furnish the passwords, the British authorities would have found a surprise in the decrypted files. They would have read a missive that went something like this: „Mother, how could you have done that? I’ve had no peace since they gave me the news, that you asked for my pardon.“ It was one of the politically impassioned letters written by Pertini, a beloved president of the Italian Republic who fought fascism at an immense personal cost, amidst arrests, internal exile and harsh prison conditions. Yet he reproached his mother for applying to the Mussolini regime for his pardon. Pertini deeply understood that mass surveillance lies at the foundation of any authoritarian state.

—Stefania Maurizi, Secret Power, (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 174.

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