Glenn Greenwald Quotes - Page 2

There is thus little or no ability for an internet user to know when they are being covertly propagandized by their government, which is precisely what makes it so appealing to intelligence agencies, so powerful, and so dangerous.

I know it's a really hard concept to process, but the fact that Govt accuses someone of being a Terrorist doesn't mean they are.

Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does.

As always with any discussion of elite immunity, it's crucial to note that what makes this development such a particularly warped travesty is that the very same elites who enjoy this immunity have created the world's largest, and the Western world's most oppressive and merciless, penal state for ordinary citizens.

I think that - not just as a journalist but as a human being - I have the ethical responsibility to avoid actions that can harm innocent people.

Fearlessness can be its own form of power.

Revealingly, the central function of the Constitution as law--the supreme law--was to impose limitations not on the behavior of ordinary citizens but on the federal government. The government, and those who ran it, were not placed outside the law, but expressly targeted by it. Indeed, the Bill of Rights is little more than a description of the lines that the most powerful political officials are barred from crossing, even if they have the power to do so and even when the majority of citizens might wish them to do so.

I personally think honestly disclosing rather than hiding ones subjective values makes for more honest and trustworthy journalism. But no journalism - from the most stylistically objective to the most brazenly opinionated - has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data.

A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.

It's common to go from 'crashing the gate' to guarding it.

What we revealed is that this spying system is devoted not to terrorists, but is directed to innocent people around the world. None of this has anything to do with terrorism. Is Angela Merkel a terrorist?

As a journalist, I think the only question that you ask yourself - once you've determined that the material is authentic - is what is in the public interest to know. And then you go about and report it.

Those [American Jews] who favor the [Israeli] attack on Gaza are certainly guilty of such overwhelming emotional and cultural attachment to Israel and Israelis, that they long ago ceased viewing this conflict with any remnant of objectivity.

The many pro-surveillance advocates I have debated since Snowden blew the whistle have been quick to echo [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt's view that privacy is for people who have something to hide. But none of them would willingly give me the passwords to their email accounts, or allow video cameras in their homes.

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence - Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class - clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it.

When you cheer for the erosion of Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs rights, you're cheering for the erosion of your own.

A: Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States. But that's not his goal. [His] objective is to expose software that people around the world use without knowing what they are exposing themselves without consciously agreeing to surrender their rights to privacy. [He] has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public.

Why is one view permissible and the other criminally barred - other than because the force of law is being used to control political discourse and one form of terrorism (violence in the Muslim world) is done by, rather than to, the west?

Snowden has enough [sic] information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had. The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.

The hallmark of an authoritarian idiot is yelling TERRORIST-LOVER! at anyone questioning the definition of Terrorist.

Only In America can a renowned and devoted terrorism supporter like Peter King be the arbiter of national security and treason.

There are few things more bizarre than watching people advocate that another country be bombed even while acknowledging that it will achieve no good outcomes other than safeguarding the 'credibility' of those doing the bombing. Relatedly, it's hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire than having one's national 'credibility' depend upon periodically bombing other countries.

American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.

The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything—on terrorism, drugs, even poverty—has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be?

Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy. I think what these leaks did is, they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn’t get affected by election choices and that isn’t in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.