Edward Snowden Quotes

My case clearly demonstrates the need for comprehensive whistleblower protection act reform. If we had had a real process in place, and reports of wrongdoing could be taken to real, independent arbiters rather than captured officials, I might not have had to sacrifice so much to do what at this point even the President seems to agree needed to be done.

When the United States cannibalize dollars from the defensive business of the NSA, securing our communications, protecting our systems, patching zero-day vulnerabilities, and instead we're giving those dollars to be used for creating new vulnerabilities in our systems so that they can surveil us and other people abroad who use the same systems.

The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.

The charges [government] brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense.

From the very beginning, I said there are two tracks of reform: there's the political and the technical. I don't believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people, who have too many things going on in their lives.

Extremists are not going to disappear.

When we think in the context of the last decade's infringements upon personal liberty and the last year's revelations, it's not about surveillance. It's about liberty.

It's much more important for U.S. to be able to defend against foreign attacks than it is to be able to launch successful attacks against foreign adversaries.

It is interesting that so many people who become disenchanted, who protest against their own organizations, are people who contributed something to them and then saw how it was misused.

I talk to people in the ACLU office in New York all the time. I'm able to participate in the debate and to campaign for reform. I'm just the first to come forward in the manner that I did and succeed.

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. 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.

US administration does not want me to return. People forget how I ended up in Russia. They waited until I departed Hong Kong to cancel my passport in order to trap me in Russia, because it's the most effective attack they have against me, given the political climate in the United States.

The United States need to put internet processes, policies, and procedures in place with real laws that forbid going beyond the borders of what's reasonable to ensure that the only time that we and other countries around the world exercise these authorities are when it is absolutely necessary.

I don't think it's going to be related to social or economic policies; it's going to be the fact that [Barack Obama] said let's go forward, not backward, in regard to the violations of law that occurred under the Bush administration.

If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.

What we're really debating is not security versus liberty, it's security versus surveillance. When we talk about electronic interception, the way that surveillance works is it preys on the weakness of protections that are being applied to all of our communications. The manner in which they're protected.

As inequality grows, the basic bonds of social fraternity are fraying - as we discussed in regard to Occupy Wall Street. As tensions increase, people will become more willing to engage in protest. But that moment is not now.

There are even a few [people] who still honestly believe I sold information to [Vladimir] Putin - like personally, in exchange for asylum. And this is after the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, who gets to read the NSA's reporting on my activities every morning, said all of these conspiracies are delusional.

Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people.

Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

The New York Times and The Guardian came out and said, "Hey, clemency for Snowden." But for me, the key - and I've said this from the beginning: it's not about me. I don't care if I get clemency. I don't care what happens to me.

Radicalism and extremism, while they are dangers, they exist in every society on some level.

I don't think I have committed a crime outside the domain of the US.

They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.

Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.

We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.

When it comes to social policies, I believe women have the right to make their own choices, and inequality is a really important issue.

Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.

In the United States, there hasn't been much legislative change on the surveillance issue, although there are some tepid proposals.

It's critical how we want to use these spy programs, these electronic capabilities, where we want to draw the line, and who should approve these programs, these decisions, and at what level, for engaging in operations that could lead us as a nation into a war.

We are no longer citizens, we no longer have leaders. We're subjects, and we have rulers.

We should never allow computers to make inherently governmental decisions in terms of the application of military force, even if that's happening on the internet.

What defines patriotism, for me, is the idea that one rises to act on behalf of one's country.

We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.

I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

I'm not a communist, a socialist or a radical. But these issues have to be addressed.

If the government or the parties won't address our needs, we will. It's about direct action, even civil disobedience.

Chelsea Manning got thirty-five years in prison, while I'm still free.

Maybe 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.

Russia recently passed a law - I think a terrible law - which says you have to store all of the data from Russian citizens on Russian soil just to prevent other countries from playing the same kind of legal games we're playing in this Microsoft case.

[Our system of education ]not designed to create critical thinkers.

We need to make sure that whenever we're engaging in a cyber-warfare campaign, a cyber-espionage campaign in the United States, that we understand the word cyber is used as a euphemism for the internet, because the American public would not be excited to hear that we're doing internet warfare campaigns, internet espionage campaigns, because we realize that we ourselves are impacted by it.

Arguing that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

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.

I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end.

The United States has faced threats from criminal groups, from terrorists, from spies throughout our history, and we have limited our responses. We haven't resorted to total war every time we have a conflict around the world, because that restraint is what defines us. That restraint is what gives us the moral standing to lead the world.

I'm not a movie guy. I don't know all this stuff that comes with celebrity. I don't know who the actors will be and stuff like that. But anybody who wants to talk about the issues - that's great.

In America, we collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.