Edward Snowden Quotes (1983-)

“Within a year, the young agency had already slipped the leash of its intended role of intelligence collection and analysis to establish a covert operations division.”

“If you love the truth, as I think everyone here does — you wouldn’t be listening to this, you wouldn’t be watching this, you wouldn’t be participating in this, you wouldn’t care about this, unless something in you told you that something important was happening here... We are unindicted co-conspirators in his quest to raise a lantern in the halls of power.”

“The big tech companies understood that the government had not only damaged American principles, it had hurt their businesses.”

“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.”

“Study after study has shown that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”

“The true measurement of a person's worth isn't what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs. If you're not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real.”

“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.”

“It was a question of: “All right, what now?” And I didn’t really have an idea... I talked with lawyers that were introduced to me by the journalists — human rights lawyers — and tried to plan my next stage....I talked to the United Nations. And ultimately, the United Nations came back and went..."...the U.S. has enormous sway in our organization. They pay an enormous amount of our budget. And the U.S. gets what the U.S. wants. We probably can’t help you...””

“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. It doesn’t need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that. I’m not a communist, a socialist or a radical. But these issues have to be 
addressed.”

“Julian Assange... has been charged as a political criminal — something that I understand quite well, but he has been charged as the purest sort of political criminal, for having committed the transgression of choosing the wrong side.... The charges, which are — they are absolutely an unadorned legal fiction. We are told to believe that the state has these powers over what can be said and what can’t be said...”

“When the unclassified systems of the United States government, which has a full-time information security staff, regularly gets hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private server in the renovated bathroom of a server farm in Colorado is more secure is completely ridiculous.”

“[Snowden] betrayed the trust and confidence we had in him. This was an individual with top secret clearance whose duty it was to administer these networks. He betrayed that confidence and stole some of our secrets.”

“He's obviously violated the laws of America, for which he's responsible, but I think the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far ... I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.”

“Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect.”

“While we can see Snowden’s experience as an instructional primer on both the value of whistleblowers and the costs of vilifying them, there are elements of his story—fed by the character assassination reprisal tactics of the government—that perpetuate many of the misperceptions about whistleblowers and contribute to the view that whistleblowers are problems to be addressed, rather than potential solutions. Snowden’s case also typifies the most egregious manifestations of the institutional belief that whistleblowers are problems to be addressed rather than sources of risk management and mechanisms for promoting compliance—the focus on the “messenger” rather than the “message.””

“The corporate press' "myths" include “that Edward Snowden is a Russian spy,” Greenwald noted. "While he was in Hong Kong . . . what was being said with the same authoritative tone: 'It’s very obvious: Edward Snowden is a Chinese spy.' When he ended up being trapped in Moscow, the very same people who’d said that, their accusations instantly morphed into, 'Of course, he’s a Russian spy,' without any acknowledgement they’d been saying something profoundly different just weeks earlier." ...This character assassination includes the allegation that Snowden’s motive for leaking NSA classified information is due to his being “a narcissist”—although after initially coming forward Snowden turned down numerous interview requests from top media outlets, which, Greenwald quipped, is a strange way for someone craving attention to behave...He also defended Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, whom he said had been smeared in the press for blowing the whistle....Maligning dissidents as deviant or mentally ill is a technique repressive regimes use to marginalize dissenters, Greenwald said, the rationale being that only crazy people would resist the status quo, while normal, well-adjusted people support it. He added that those reporters who are professional flatterers of the powers-that-be can’t understand someone acting and taking risks due to “conscience” because they are cowards minus consciences.”

“[Snowden] has joined the ranks of the hunted and the persecuted because he named and documented the crimes of the state. His defiance of the control and monitoring of our lives by the security and surveillance makes him an American hero.”

“As head of state and government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela I have decided to offer humanitarian asylum to the young US citizen Edward Snowden so he can come to the fatherland of Bolivar and Chavez to live away from the imperial North American persecution.”

“Mr. Snowden revealed that the NSA and FBI were obtaining warrants from the FISA Court as a subterfuge. Thus, Mr. Snowden revealed, the feds do get FISA warrants, but only as a cover for their mass undifferentiated warrantless spying. This means that NSA and FBI use of the FISA Court is largely symbolic and unneeded since the NSA and the FBI can more easily break the law and spy without warrants than they can follow the law. The degree of NSA and FBI unconstitutional and criminal spying is breathtaking. Because of Mr. Snowden, we now know that all the data the feds mines, if printed, would fill 27 times the holding capacity of the Library of Congress every year. This is unconstitutional because it defies the Fourth Amendment. It is criminal because it constitutes computer hacking, even if presidentially authorized. When Mr. Snowden began his work at the CIA and the NSA, he took two oaths. The first was to keep secret whatever his bosses told him was secret. This presumably includes not only the data that the NSA mined but also the unconstitutional and criminal means that it used to acquire all that data. The second oath that Mr. Snowden took was to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. This means not only its plain text but also the values that underlie the text... Today he is an American banished from his homeland. Yet he remains a symbol of greatness of historic proportion and a reminder of the privations that heroes for the truth often must endure.”