I don't think it is the most important thing. I think it is the fact that the director of national intelligence gave a false statement to Congress under oath, which is a felony. If we allow our officials to knowingly break the law publicly and face no consequences, we're instituting a culture of immunity, and this is what I think historically will actually be considered the biggest disappointment of the [Barack] Obama administration.
Edward SnowdenI'm not a politician, and I do not think I am as effective in this way as people who actually prepare for it - is to focus on technical reform, because I speak the language of technology. I spoke with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. We agree on the necessity for this generation to create what he calls the Magna Carta for the Internet. We want to say what "digital rights" should be. What values should we be protecting, and how do we assert them.
Edward SnowdenMaybe boutique media, maybe people who are reading papers and talking to academics and whatnot, maybe they understand, because they're high-information. But a lot of people are still unaware that I never intended to end up in Russia. They're not aware that journalists were live-tweeting pictures of my seat on the flight to Latin America I wasn't able to board because the US government revoked my passport.
Edward SnowdenWe're opening the doors to people launching missiles and dropping bombs by taking the human out of the decision chain for deciding how we should respond to these threats. And this is something we're seeing more and more happening in the traditional means as our methods of warfare become increasingly automated and roboticized such as through drone warfare.
Edward SnowdenSomething we have to remember is that everything about the internet is interconnected. All of our systems are not just common to us because of the network links between them, but because of the software packages, because of the hardware devices that comprise it. The same router that's deployed in the United States is deployed in China.
Edward Snowden