Edward Snowden Quotes - Page 5

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I have a somewhat sneaky way of effecting political change.

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.

One of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the [George W.] Bush administration is the increased assertion of the "state secrets" privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU - which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention - from getting their day in court.

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?

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.

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

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.

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 do not expect to see home again.

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

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.

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.

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.

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