These [NSA] programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.
Edward SnowdenYou can show a guy sort of peeking over the wall, you can see a guy tunneling underneath, you can see a guy going through the front door. All of those, in cyber terms, are vulnerabilities, because it's not that you have to look for one hole of a specific type. It's the whole paradigm.
Edward SnowdenThe courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen - in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case - that they have become markedly more skeptical.
Edward SnowdenHas the center of gravity shifted such that all governments have greater powers and fewer restrictions than they ever had, and are empowered by technology in a way that no government ever was in the past?
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 Snowden