By leaning on companies, by leaning on infrastructure providers, by leaning on researchers, graduate students, post-docs, even undergrads, to look at the challenges having an untrusted internet, where we have to put our communications on wires that are owned by a phone company that we can't trust, that's working in collaboration with a government that we can't trust, in areas around the world, we can restructure that communications fabric in a way that it's encrypted.
Edward SnowdenA given order may at any given time fail to represent those values, even work against those values. I think that's the dynamic we're seeing today.
Edward SnowdenWe have to recognise that rights are being violated. The United Nations actually filed a report that found that that was the case, that mass surveillance is a violation of rights.
Edward SnowdenPresidents should not be exempted from the same standards of reason and evidence and justification that any other citizen or civil movement should be held to.
Edward SnowdenWhen you think about the abolition of slavery for example, for the ruling class with the rich white people owning plantations and states, and things like that, slavery was to their benefit. To oppose it didn't make any sense at all on a rational basis. But on a rights basis, on a principle basis, it made obvious, overwhelming sense.
Edward SnowdenI hope you have read the election programme of the Labour Party...this is not socialism. It is Bolshevism run mad.
Edward SnowdenMany of our ally states don't have these constitutional protections - in the UK, in New Zealand, in Australia. They've lost the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. All of those countries, in the wake of these surveillance revelations, rushed through laws that were basically ghostwritten by the National Security Agency to enable mass surveillance without court oversight, without all of the standard checks and balances that one would expect.
Edward Snowden