Edward snowden quotes

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.

If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.

While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice - that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

The reality is if we sit back and allow a few officials behind closed doors to launch offensive attacks without any oversight against foreign nations, against people we don't like, against political groups, radicals, and extremists whose ideas we may not agree with, and could be repulsive or even violent - if we let that happen without public buy-in, we won't have any seat at the table of government to decide whether or not it's appropriate for these officials to drag us into some kind of war activity that we don't want, but we weren't aware of at the time.

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

We do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power.

The question is: Particularly in the post-9/11 era, are societies becoming more liberal or more authoritarian?

My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled. If they really wanted to capture me, they would've allowed me to travel to Latin America, because the CIA can operate with impunity down there. They did not want that; they chose to keep me in Russia.

I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.

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.

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

I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.

When we have some horrible terrorist attacks happen in some country we see in the recording that follows, that the intelligence community already knew about these people in advance. We know that these countries were involved in intelligence sharing premiums, that they benefited from mass surveillance, and yet they didn't stop the attacks. Yet at the same time we immediately see intelligence officials running to the newspapers and claiming that we need more surveillance, that we need more intrusion, that we need more expense of powers because it could have stopped an attack.

We need the security standards to apply to the internet. We need to be able to trust that when we send our emails through Verizon, that Verizon isn't sharing with the NSA, that Verizon isn't sharing them with the FBI or German intelligence or French intelligence or Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence.

The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

One of the kind of unexpectedly liberating things of becoming this global fugitive is the fact that you don't worry so much about tomorrow. You think more about today. And unexpectedly, I like that very much.

The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.

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.

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.

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 seen enough criminality on the part of government. It is hypocritical to make this allegation against me. They have narrowed the public sphere of influence.

Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President

I don't care if I end up in jail or Guantánamo or whatever, kicked out of a plane with two gunshots in the face. I did what I did because I believe it is the right thing to do, and I will continue to do that.

I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.

Bulk collection means all of your communications are being secretly intercepted. They are being stolen as they cross India, and they're being stored in these silos so that they can be rifled through at the convenience of secret agents, basically.

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.

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

When we talk about the assertion of basically new government privileges with weak or no justification, we don't even have to look at international law to see the failings in them.

And that's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build and it's not something I'm willing to live under.

When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.

Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries.

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.

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.

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.

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.

We have to recognise that rights are being violated. The United Nations actually filed a report that found that that was the case, that mass surveillance is a violation of rights.

The issue is we're losing leverage. Governments are increasingly getting more power and we are increasingly losing our ability to control that power, and even to be aware of that power.

What I wanted to do was give society the information it needed to decide if it wanted to change the system.

Richard Nixon got kicked out of Washington for tapping one hotel suite. Today we're tapping every American citizen in the country, and no one has been put on trial for it or even investigated. We don't even have an inquiry into it.

I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.

I have a somewhat sneaky way of effecting political change.

We have the right of revolution. Revolution does not always have to be weapons and warfare; it's also about revolutionary ideas.

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

In the United States the White House has appointed two different independent panels who had full access to classified information for the last 10 years that master balance has been in place in the United States, and they found that despite intercepting the calls - everybody in the country, - it had never stopped a single terrorist attack. So the question is, why would these officials be pursuing these policies, if we know they don't work, if they don't stop terrorism?

I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.

Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.

Radicals are not going to disappear. They're going to go underground. They're going to be hardened. And they're not going to be exposed to contrary ideas made by educated people who can make real, convincing, and persuasive arguments to deradicalise these people.

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

Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich.

Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

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.

I describe myself as an indoor cat, because I'm a computer guy and I always have been.

I'm saying we need to be aware of it, and we need to be able to distinguish when political developments are occurring that are contrary to the public interest.

Privacy is a function of liberty.

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.

When people are talking about cyber weapons, digital weapons, what they really mean is a malicious program that's used for a military purpose. A cyber weapon could be something as simple as an old virus from 1995 that just happens to still be effective if you use it for that purpose.

Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.

All the governments just want to have more power when it comes to economic espionage, diplomatic manipulation and political influence.

The Iraq war that I signed up for was launched on false premises. The American people were misled. Now, whether that was due to bad faith or simply mistakes in intelligence, I can't say for sure. But I can say it shows the problem of putting too much faith in intelligence systems without debating them in public.

The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative.

We decentralise permissions over the use of our communications.

Ever since I've been here [in Russia], my life has been consumed with work that's actually fulfilling and satisfying.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

When Laura Poitras asked me if she could film our encounters, I was extremely reluctant. I’m grateful that I allowed her to persuade me. The result is a brave and brilliant film that deserves the honor and recognition it has received. My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.

If I am traitor, who did I betray? I gave all my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason, I think people really need to consider who they think they're working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy.

I would rather be without a state than without a voice.

The US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.

In the end, the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.

We have to be able to reject disproportionate and unjustified responses in the cyber domain just as we do in the physical domain.

It's becoming less and less the National Security Agency and more and more the national surveillance agency. It's gaining more offensive powers with each passing year.

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.

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.

My perspective is if you're not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don't care enough.

I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts. Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many.

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

I think that's actually what's missing from government, for the most part. We've got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It's just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven't engaged with Washington until recently. They're still playing catch-up.

You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

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.

[Brazil] went to the UN and said, "We need new standards for this." We need to take a look at what they're calling "data sovereignty."

We don't have to ask for our privacy, we can take it back.

I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can't allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I'm not going to be part of that.

You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.

In liberal societies we don't typically require citizens to rearrange their activities, their lives, the way they go about their business, to make it easy for the police to do their work.

You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You've converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.

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

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

There are cyber threats out there, this is a dangerous world, and we have to be safe, we have to be secure no matter the cost.

Terrorism kills far fewer people than cigarettes, or alcohol, or car accidents. But we don't see ourselves restructuring society and lives in order to make those threats go away.

A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises.

So many of the things we're told by the government simply aren't true.

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

I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight.

It's really hard to take that step-not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I'm willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.

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

The US government still has no idea what documents I have because encryption works

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.

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.

When people say, "I have nothing to hide," what they're saying is, "My rights don't matter."

What is right is not always the same as what is legal

You will never be completely free from risk if you're free. The only time you can be free from risk is when you're in prison.

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.

You're not patriotic just because you back whoever's in power today or their policies. You're patriotic when you work to improve the lives of the people of your country, your community and your family. Sometimes that means making hard choices, choices that go against your personal interest.

For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.

You have to remember the way the internet works, when you communicate with the server, it's very likely not in your country. It's somewhere else in the world.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.

My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.

These [NSA] programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.

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.

Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.

The true measurement of a person's worth isn't what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs. If you're not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real.

I do not expect to see home again.

Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an e-mail, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace, and the Government has decided that it's good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you've never been suspected of doing a crime.

We have to be able to ask questions in order to answer them.

The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

The surveillance revelations are critically important because they revealed that our rights are being redefined in secret, by secret courts that were never intended to have that role - without the consent of the public, without even the awareness of the majority of our political representatives.

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 authoritarian one believed that an individual's rights were basically provided by governments and were determined by states. The other society - ours - tended to believe that a large portion of our rights were inherent and couldn't be abrogated by governments, even if this seemed necessary.

I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.

Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.