Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.
Edward SnowdenWe have the right of revolution. Revolution does not always have to be weapons and warfare; it's also about revolutionary ideas.
Edward SnowdenIn the United States, there hasn't been much legislative change on the surveillance issue, although there are some tepid proposals.
Edward SnowdenI describe myself as an indoor cat, because I'm a computer guy and I always have been.
Edward SnowdenThe charges [government] brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense.
Edward SnowdenA different [Ronald] Reagan-era authority: EO 12333, an executive order for foreign-intelligence collection, as opposed to the ones we now use domestically. So this one isn't even authorized by law. It's just an old-ass piece of paper with Reagan's signature on it, which has been updated a couple times since then. So what happened was that all of a sudden these massive, behemoth companies realized their data centers - sending hundreds of millions of people's communications back and forth every day - were completely unprotected, electronically naked.
Edward Snowden