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.
Edward SnowdenWe need to make sure that whenever we're engaging in a cyber-warfare campaign, a cyber-espionage campaign in the United States, that we understand the word cyber is used as a euphemism for the internet, because the American public would not be excited to hear that we're doing internet warfare campaigns, internet espionage campaigns, because we realize that we ourselves are impacted by it.
Edward SnowdenIn the United States the White House has appointed two different independent panels who had full access to classified information for the last 10 years that master balance has been in place in the United States, and they found that despite intercepting the calls - everybody in the country, - it had never stopped a single terrorist attack. So the question is, why would these officials be pursuing these policies, if we know they don't work, if they don't stop terrorism?
Edward SnowdenIf an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.
Edward SnowdenIf I and other whistleblowers are sentenced to long years in prison without so much as a chance to explain our motivations to a jury, it will have a deeply chilling effect on future whistleblowers working as I did to expose government abuse and overreach. It will chill speech. It will corrode the quality of our democracy.
Edward Snowden