Edward Snowden Quotes

When it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth. The technical sector is the backbone of the American economy, and if we start engaging in these kind of behaviors, in these kind of attacks, we're setting a standard, we're creating a new international norm of behavior that says this is what nations do. This is what developed nations do.

[Sovereignty] would break the American monopoly, but it would also break Internet business, because you'd have to have a data center in every country. And data centers are tremendously expensive, a big capital investment.

At the trial of Chelsea Manning, the government could point to no case of specific damage that had been caused by the massive revelation of classified information. The charges are a reaction to the government's embarrassment more than genuine concern about these activities, or they would substantiate what harms were done.

I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

There is more action in some other countries. In Germany, they've called for a very serious inquiry that's discovering more and more. They've just discovered a significant violation of the German Constitution that had been concealed from the Parliament.

Technology provides us means outside of governments to begin enforcing our rights, enforcing protection of civil liberties, regardless of law, through the implementation of systems and standards.

A 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.

People at civil-liberties organizations say it's a sea change, and that it's very clear judges have begun to question more critically assertions made by the executive. Even though it seems so obvious now, it is extraordinary in the context of the last decade, because courts had simply said they were not the best branch to adjudicate these claims - which is completely wrong, because they are the only nonpolitical branch. They are the branch that is specifically charged with deciding issues that cannot be impartially decided by politicians.

When I talk about the polling, I'm talking about the principles. It shows these officials are knowingly attempting to shift public opinion, even though they know what they say is not factual.

What we need to do is we need to create new international standards of behavior - not just national laws, because this is a global problem. We can't just fix it in the United States, because there are other countries that don't follow U.S. laws. We have to create international standards that say that cyber attacks should only ever occur when it is absolutely necessary.

Every time somebody on the internet sort of glances at us sideways, we launch an attack at them. That's not going to work out for us long term, and the U.S. have to get ahead of the problem if we're going to succeed.

The public don't want to authorize the internet to become a battleground. We need to do everything we can as a society to keep that a neutral zone, to keep that an economic zone that can reflect our values, both politically, socially, and economically.

If it comes to a question of law, the charges they brought against me - the Espionage Act - is called the quintessential political crime. A political crime, in legal terms, is defined as any crime against a state, as opposed to against an individual. Assassination, for example, is not a political crime because you've killed a person, an individual, and they've been harmed; their family's been harmed. But the state itself, you can't be extradited for harming it.

Something 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.

Privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

I've talked to a lot of pretty good lawyers around the world. I'm non-extraditable. That's the real reason the US government was pissed off, even when I was initially in Hong Kong.

The internet is shared critical infrastructure for everyone on earth. It's not supposed to be a domain of warfare. We're not supposed to be putting the Unied States' economy on the frontlines in the battleground.

When the police officers knock on your door with a warrant, they don't expect you to give them a tour. It's supposed to be an adversarial process so that it's used in these extraordinary powers are applied only when there's no alternative. Only when they're absolutely necessary, and only when they're proportionate to the threat faced by these individuals.

The question that we, as a society, have to ask is, are our collective rights worth a small relative advantage in our ability to spy on other countries and foreign citizens? I have my opinion about that, but we all collectively have to come to our opinion about it.

The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night.

I wasn't trying to change the laws or slow down the machine. Maybe I should have. My critics say that I was not revolutionary enough. But they forget that I am a product of the system. I worked those desks, I know those people and I still have some faith in them, that the services can be reformed.

There's not much value to us attacking Chinese systems. We might take a few computers offline. We might take a factory offline. We might steal secrets from a university research programs, and even something high-tech. But how much more does the United States spend on research and development than China does?

My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.

It's important to remember when you start doing things like attacking hospitals through the internet, when you start attacking things like internet exchange points, when something goes wrong, people can die. If a hospital's infrastructure is affected, lifesaving equipment turns off.

America should be cooling down the tensions in the internet, making it a more trusted environment, making it a more secure environment, making it a more reliable environment, because that's the foundation of our economy and our future.

It's OK if we wiretap Osama bin Laden. I want to know what he's planning - obviously not him nowadays, but that kind of thing. I don't care if it's a pope or a bin Laden. As long as investigators must go to a judge - an independent judge, a real judge, not a secret judge - and make a showing that there's probable cause to issue a warrant, then they can do that. And that's how it should be done.

When it comes to cyber conflicts between, say, America and China or even a Middle Eastern nation, an African nation, a Latin American nation, a European nation, we have more to lose.

Even if it were, you run into the same problem with international commerce: if you create a device that is famous for compromised security and it has an American back door, nobody is gonna buy it.

I'm still alive, and I don't lose sleep because I have done what I feel I needed to do, it was the right thing to do and I am not going to be afraid.

Your rights matter, because you never know when you're going to need them.

The issue I brought forward most clearly was that of mass surveillance, not of surveillance in general.

We are a representative democracy. But how did we get there? We got there through direct action. And that's enshrined in our Constitution and in our values.

I'm not a spy, which is the real question

I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

The internet has to be protected from intrusive monitoring or else the medium upon which we all rely for the basis of our economy and our normal life, we'll lose that, and it's going to have broad effects as a consequence that we cannot predict.

We have to argue forcefully and demand that the government recognise that these programmes do not prevent - mass surveillance does not prevent acts of terrorism.

If we allow the United States to set the precedent that national borders don't matter when it comes to the protection of people's information, other countries are watching. They're paying attention to our examples and what is normative behavior in terms of dealing with digital information.

I don't want to directly confront great powers, which we cannot defeat on their terms. They have more money, more clout, more airtime. We cannot be effective without a mass movement, and the American people today are too comfortable to adapt to a mass movement.

There have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break the law.

There is a technical solution to every political problem...

Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.

If the United States is promoting the development of exploits, of vulnerabilities, of insecurity in this critical infrastructure, and we're not fixing it when we find it, instead we put it on the shelf so we can use it the next time we want to launch an attack against some foreign country. We're leaving ourselves at risk.

As for my personal politics, some people seem to think I'm some kind of archlibertarian, a hyper-conservative.

There is a policy response that needs to occur. There is also a technical response that needs to occur. It is the development community that can really craft the solutions and make sure we are safe.

By putting these sort of lines around what ideas are proper or improper, we lose things.

All this is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it helps people establish what they value; they understand the sort of ideas they identify with. The curse is that they aren't challenged in their views. The Internet becomes an echo chamber. Users don't see the counterarguments.

Let's put it this way. The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with the journalists, and they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalist, what they have, what they don't have, because encryption works.