Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?
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 majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.
I'm not an anarchist. I'm not saying, "Burn it to the ground."
The 'music' is not an open court and a fair trial.
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.
Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage.
My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.
When it comes to social policies, I believe women have the right to make their own choices, and inequality is a really important issue.
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?
If you begin acting contrary to the public's interest, and there is no alternative governmental model, with which you're willing to engage, we, the people, will have to put forth our own extra governmental models and methods of trying to restore the balance of liberty to the liberal tradition of Western society.
We don't have a great clash of civilizations, a clash of ideologies, a clash of alternative models, where governments thought to themselves, if we go too far, if we sort of trample unreasonably on rights, we'll give birth to a political movement which will cost us our credibility, and will possibly cost us our offices, because people will vote for the other team, the other guys.
Nobody's going to vote for Isis.
Now terrorism is not the greatest threat facing our societies.
We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.
Imagine, if you will, you're sitting at my desk in Hawaii. You have access to the entire world, as far as you can see it. Last several days, content of internet communications. Every email that's sent. Every website that's visited by every individual. Every text message that somebody sends on their phone. Every phone call they make.
The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.
The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.
They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.
Our founders did not write that 'We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.'
The sad truth is that societies that demand whistleblowers be martyrs often find themselves without either, and always when it matters the most.
I have had no contact with the Chinese government ... I only work with journalists.
When you think about the abolition of slavery for example, for the ruling class with the rich white people owning plantations and states, and things like that, slavery was to their benefit. To oppose it didn't make any sense at all on a rational basis. But on a rights basis, on a principle basis, it made obvious, overwhelming sense.
For people who aren't familiar with my background, I didn't graduate high school. My career high salary was about $200,000. My last position was about $122,000. For a guy without a high school diploma, that's pretty good.
We're now more than a year since my NSA revelations, and despite numerous hours of testimony before Congress, despite tons of off-the-record quotes from anonymous officials who have an ax to grind, not a single US official, not a single representative of the United States government, has ever pointed to a single case of individualized harm caused by these revelations. This, despite the fact that former NSA director Keith Alexander said this would cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation.
