Edward Snowden Quotes

If 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.

If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns to the people most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people themselves authorized.

When we look at the full-on mass surveillance watching everyone in the country, in the United States, it doesn't work. It didn't stop the attacks in Boston. The marathon bombings. Where again, we knew who these individuals were. It didn't stop the Underwear Bomber, whose father walked into an embassy and warned us about this individual before he walked onto an airplane. And it's not going to stop the next attacks either. Because again, they're not public safety programmes. They're spying programmes. They are valuable for spying.

What the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation. They want to have a perfect record of the last five years of your life, so when you come to their attention, they can know everything about you. I'm not down with that, but [Bill] Binney was trying to create something like that.

I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.

If Congress is going to investigate baseball players about whether or not they told the truth, how can we justify giving the most powerful intelligence official, [James] Clapper, a pass? This is how J. Edgar Hoover ended up in charge of the FBI forever.

We should know at least the broad strokes of the powers that the government's claiming in our name, and using allegedly, on our behalf. And also against us as well.

I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.

I think the public still isn't aware of the frequency with which the cyber-attacks, as they're being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world, not just the US.

The community of technical experts who really manage the internet, who built the internet and maintain it, are becoming increasingly concerned about the activities of agencies like the NSA or Cyber Command, because what we see is that defense is becoming less of a priority than offense.

There's no question that the US is engaged in economic spying. If there's information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they'll go after that information and they'll take it.

I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.

I'm familiar with Andrei Sakharov reputation, but I don't know his personal history at all.

If we don't do anything, if we go along with the status quo, we are going to have a mass surveillance world.

My whole model, from the beginning, was not to personally publish a single document. I provided these documents to journalists because I didn't want my biases to decide what's in the public interest and what is not.

Look at the reactions of liberal governments to the surveillance revelations during the last years. In the United States, we've got this big debate, but we've got official paralysis - because they're the ones who had their hand caught most deeply in the cookie jar.

The [Barack] Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They're afraid of death by a thousand cuts - you know, leaks and things like that.

Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.

I don't spend all day running hand-on-hat from shadowy figures - I'm in exile.

The rule of law doesn't mean the police are in charge, but that we all answer to the same laws.

The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.

The public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the 'consent of the governed' is meaningless... The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

Do you check it when you travel, do you check it when you're just at home? They'd be able to tell something called your 'pattern of life.' When are you doing these kind of activities? When do you wake up? When do you go to sleep? What other phones are around you when you wake up and go to sleep? Are you with someone who's not your wife?

I don't go out and play football and stuff - that's not me. I want to think, I want to build, I want to talk, I want to create.

Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?

The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.

The internet is the most complex system that humans have ever invented. And with every internet enabled operation that we've seen so far, all of these offensive operations, we see knock on effects. We see unintended consequences.

I hope you have read the election programme of the Labour Party...this is not socialism. It is Bolshevism run mad.

Using the language of heroism, calling Daniel Ellsberg a hero, and calling the other people who made great sacrifices heroes - even though what they have done is heroic - is to distinguish them from the civic duty they performed, and excuses the rest of us from the same civic duty to speak out when we see something wrong, when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, abusing power, engaging in massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United States. We have to speak out or we are party to that bad action.

As a general rule, so long as you have any choice at all, you should never route through or peer with the UK under any circumstances. Their fibers are radioactive, and even the Queen's selfies to the pool boy get logged.

They still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they're coming from and they have no idea where they're going. And if that's the case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?

I'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.

We don't like to use the phrase "state security" in the United States because it reminds us of all the bad regimes. But it's a key concept, because when these officials are out on TV, they're not talking about what's good for you. They're not talking about what's good for business. They're not talking about what's good for society. They're talking about the protection and perpetuation of a national state system.

Internet exchanges and internet service providers - international fiber optic landing points - these are the key tools that governments go after in order to enable their programs of mass surveillance. If they want to be able to watch the entire population of a country instead of a single individual, you have to go after those bulk interchanges.

Too often we forget that social and political movements don't happen overnight. They don't bring change immediately - you have to build a critical mass of understanding of the issues.

One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.

It's much easier, I think, to protect communications while they're in transit at least, than it is to enforce legislation in every country in the world to say that you can't do this.

The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security. Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security, just so they have a better chance of keeping an eye on us.

All those people who went out [to Occupy Wall Street] missed work, didn't get paid. Those were individuals who were already feeling the effects of inequality, so they didn't have a lot to lose. And then the individuals who were louder, more disruptive and, in many ways, more effective at drawing attention to their concerns were immediately castigated by authorities. They were cordoned off, pepper-sprayed, thrown in jail.

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.

By creating a self-policing, self-reporting, sort of self-monitoring culture through law, through statute, and imposing that on the academic world, I think not only are we losing a significant measure of freedom in academic traditions and in our civil society, but we're actually making ourselves less competitive with every other country around the world that does not do that. Because that's where researchers are going to go and that's where academics are going to go. And ultimately, that's where breakthroughs are going to occur.

We have to decide why terrorism is a new threat. There has always been terrorism.

Anyway, it's not true that the authorities cannot access the content of the phone even if there is no back door. When I was at the NSA, we did this every single day, even on Sundays. I believe that encryption is a civic responsibility, a civic duty.

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.

We'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.

When it comes to political engagement, I'm not a politician - I'm an engineer.

I don't want the stage. I'm terrified of giving these talking heads some distraction, some excuse to jeopardize, smear, and delegitimize a very important movement.