I describe it as tribalism because they're very tightly woven communities. Lack of civility is part of it, because that's how Internet tribes behave. We see this more and more in electoral politics, which have become increasingly poisonous.
Edward SnowdenThe bare bones tools for a cyber-attack are to identify a vulnerability in the system you want to gain access to or you want to subvert or you want to deny, destroy, or degrade, and then to exploit it, which means to send codes, deliver code to that system somehow and get that code to that vulnerability, to that crack in their wall, jam it in there, and then have it execute.
Edward SnowdenOn the other hand, the Internet is there to fill needs that people have for information and socialization. We get this sort of identification thing going on nowadays because it's a very fractious time. We live in a time of troubles.
Edward SnowdenLet's put it this way. The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with the journalists, and they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalist, what they have, what they don't have, because encryption works.
Edward SnowdenIn the United States, there hasn't been much legislative change on the surveillance issue, although there are some tepid proposals.
Edward SnowdenOne of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the [George W.] Bush administration is the increased assertion of the "state secrets" privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU - which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention - from getting their day in court.
Edward Snowden