Edward Snowden Quotes - Page 10

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.

If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they'll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.

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.

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.

Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.

I grew up with the understanding that the world I lived in was one where people enjoyed a sort of freedom to communicate with each other in privacy, without it being monitored, without it being measured or analyzed or sort of judged by these shadowy figures or systems, any time they mention anything that travels across public lines.

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.

All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. That is a milestone we left a long time ago.

If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.

I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is.

After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power - the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government - for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism.

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.

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.

I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.

There are unquestionable violations of our Constitution.

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

On the other hand, the Internet is there to fill needs that people have for information and socialization. We get this sort of identification thing going on nowadays because it's a very fractious time. We live in a time of troubles.

I think we're going to see a move away from that, because young people - digital natives who spend their life on the Internet - get saturated. It's like a fashion trend, and becomes a sign of a lack of sophistication.

Americans 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 describe it as tribalism because they're very tightly woven communities. Lack of civility is part of it, because that's how Internet tribes behave. We see this more and more in electoral politics, which have become increasingly poisonous.

You are also asked to take an oath, and that's the oath of service. The oath of service is not to secrecy, but to the Constitution - to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That's the oath that I kept, that James Clapper and former NSA director Keith Alexander did not. You raise your hand and you take the oath in your class when you are on board. All government officials are made to do it who work for the intelligence agencies - at least, that's where I took the oath.

When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

People would publish their websites; other people would read them. But there was no real back and forth other than through e-mail. Web 2.0 was what they called the collaborative web - Facebook, Twitter, the social media.

We can still publicly post a message to Facebook that's globally readable. But we could also adjust things so that they can only be shared with those closest to us, and the confident that this is enforced through both legal and a systemic standards-based protection.