I can do more good outside of prison... This country is worth dying for.
Many of our ally states don't have these constitutional protections - in the UK, in New Zealand, in Australia. They've lost the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. All of those countries, in the wake of these surveillance revelations, rushed through laws that were basically ghostwritten by the National Security Agency to enable mass surveillance without court oversight, without all of the standard checks and balances that one would expect.
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 I and other whistleblowers are sentenced to long years in prison without so much as a chance to explain our motivations to a jury, it will have a deeply chilling effect on future whistleblowers working as I did to expose government abuse and overreach. It will chill speech. It will corrode the quality of our democracy.
In the United States, there hasn't been much legislative change on the surveillance issue, although there are some tepid proposals.
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.
A given order may at any given time fail to represent those values, even work against those values. I think that's the dynamic we're seeing today.
We have these traditional political parties that are less and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people, so people are in search of their own values.
Acting Government officials, they said they wanted - they would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me as I was returning from the grocery store, and have me die in the shower.
All those people who went out [to Occupy Wall Street] missed work, didn't get paid. Those were individuals who were already feeling the effects of inequality, so they didn't have a lot to lose. And then the individuals who were louder, more disruptive and, in many ways, more effective at drawing attention to their concerns were immediately castigated by authorities. They were cordoned off, pepper-sprayed, thrown in jail.
I don't think it is the most important thing. I think it is the fact that the director of national intelligence gave a false statement to Congress under oath, which is a felony. If we allow our officials to knowingly break the law publicly and face no consequences, we're instituting a culture of immunity, and this is what I think historically will actually be considered the biggest disappointment of the [Barack] Obama administration.
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.
In the United States and some of the other countries involved it's sort of a "five eyes" global spying alliance. That's the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. They've had a little bit of a more muscular public response. Now, they haven't been satisfying or really meaningful in any country yet. But they have been engaging.
When it comes to the internet, when it comes to the United States' technical economy, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth.
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.
Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to the government, but our futures.
Every time we walk on to the field of battle and the field of battle is the internet, it doesn't matter if we shoot our opponents a hundred times and hit every time. As long as they've hit us once, we've lost, because the U.S. is so much more reliant on those systems.
Suspicionless surveillance has no place in a democracy. The next 60 days are a historic opportunity to rein in the NSA, but the only one who can end the worst of its abuses is you. Call your representatives and tell them that the unconstitutional 'bulk collection' of Americans' private records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act must end.
One of the reasons that I came forward and sort burned of my life to the ground, and I can't go back and see my family in the United States - I obviously lost my job, which I was quite comfortable with. I lost my home. It was because I felt there was no alternative.
We should know at least the broad strokes of the powers that the government's claiming in our name, and using allegedly, on our behalf. And also against us as well.
When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future, we're going to know that that's a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.
As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we’re going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production - year after year after year - some of that needs to be reinvested in society.
Where are we going to reject that easy but flawed process of letting the intelligence services do whatever they want? It's inevitable that it will happen. I think it's going to be where Internet businesses go.
You shouldn't change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If you sacrifice your values because you're afraid, you don't care about those values very much.
I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.
