Edward Snowden
Perhaps I am naive, but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.
What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?
Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.
For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.
I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.
Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%.
I would rather be without a state than without a voice.
The only time you can be completely free from risk is when you're in prison.
Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him... the better off we all are.
If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.
When you are in positions of privileged access... you see things that may be disturbing. Over time, that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up.
The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.
What we've seen over the last decade is we've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.
The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.
I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions.
I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.
We have seen enough criminality on the part of government. It is hypocritical to make this allegation against me. They have narrowed the public sphere of influence.
I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong's rule of law.
My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.
All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.
I have had no contact with the Chinese government. I only work with journalists.
Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?
When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.
A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises.
America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.
I grew up with the understanding that the world I lived in was one where people enjoyed a sort of freedom to communicate with each other in privacy, without it being monitored, without it being measured or analyzed or sort of judged by these shadowy figures or systems, any time they mention anything that travels across public lines.
After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power - the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government - for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism.
The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.
I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight.
If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.
Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.
I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don't realize it.
Arguing that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.Collection: Nsa
I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.Collection: Creativity
Your rights matter, because you never know when you're going to need them.Collection: Rights
We are no longer citizens, we no longer have leaders. We're subjects, and we have rulers.Collection: Leader
There have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break the law.Collection: Law
If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.Collection: Real
Privacy is a function of liberty.Collection: Liberty
I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.Collection: Light
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.Collection: Children
Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an e-mail, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace, and the Government has decided that it's good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you've never been suspected of doing a crime.Collection: Writing
Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.Collection: Truth Is
Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries.Collection: Country
I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.Collection: Thinking
Privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.Collection: Want
Richard Nixon got kicked out of Washington for tapping one hotel suite. Today we're tapping every American citizen in the country, and no one has been put on trial for it or even investigated. We don't even have an inquiry into it.Collection: Country
These [NSA] programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.Collection: Nsa
When people say, "I have nothing to hide," what they're saying is, "My rights don't matter."Collection: Rights