Edward Snowden

"I think Snowden has done a service ... I wouldn’t have had the courage, and maybe not even the intellectual capacity, to do it the way he did it ... There’s a logic to what he has done that is impressive ... He really has refrained from anything that was truly dangerous, with regard to our security — regardless of what people say. He has been circumspect about what he's released, how he's released it, who he's released it to. It’s clear to me from listening to his personal statements — I think those are important — that he did have a genuinely altruistic motive for doing it."

"WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run."

"I suggest... we look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass obedience will be exploit­ed in future. Will the workers 'stood down' ever see their jobs again? Will artificial intelligence consume freedoms that have been suspended? As Edward Snowden says, the disease of mass surveillance will outlast this pandemic."

"In a call with reporters hosted by the Freedom of the Press Foundation on Tuesday, board member John Cusack expressed his umbrage with the media’s “character assassination” of Edward Snowden and neglect of The Real Issues. “Why are the red and blue elites in the establishment press so afraid of an informed public?” he asked rhetorically. “Why do they keep changing the subject?” “Have the establishment media been so co-opted by government access that they’ve lost all sense of proportionality?”"

"(Reuters) - Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional. Snowden, who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the 2013 disclosures and still faces U.S. espionage charges, said on Twitter that the ruling was a vindication of his decision to go public with evidence of the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping operation."

"To me Snowden is a hero because he revealed secrets that we should all know, that the United States has repeatedly violated the fourth amendment. He should be welcomed and offered asylum. But he has no place to hide because every country is intimidated by the United States."

"Some hentai games are very good. While wanton sexuality, ironically enough, seems to turn most people off, in some (admittedly rare) cases it can actually deepen your attachment to a character and really make you appreciate a plot that much more. There are hentai games that are funny as hell, emotionally touching (even through a language barrier), and there are also games that are just straight up twisted."

"My greatest fear was that no one would listen to my warning. Never have I been so glad to have been so wrong. The reaction in certain countries has been particularly inspiring to me... At the NSA, I witnessed with growing alarm the surveillance of whole populations without any suspicion of wrongdoing, and it threatens to become the greatest human rights challenge of our time. The NSA and other spying agencies... have revoked our right to privacy and broken into our lives. And they did it without asking the public in any country, even their own. Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location... When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there... They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target's reputation. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement — where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion — and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye... These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power."

"My act of conscience began with a statement: "I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. That's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build, and it's not something I'm willing to live under." Days later, I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice... when all of us band together against injustices and in defense of privacy and basic human rights, we can defend ourselves from even the most powerful systems.""

"When we've got these people who have practically limitless powers within a society, if they get a pass without so much as a slap on the wrist, what example does that set for the next group of officials that come into power? To push the lines a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, and we'll realize that we're no longer citizens - we're subjects."

""When you are in the position privileged access, like a system administrator, you are exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee..."

"Praxis films (2013)"

"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. I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under."

"You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will."

"Hi and Merry Christmas. I’m honored to have a chance to speak with you and your family this year. Recently we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide system of mass surveillance watching everything we do. Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information."

"The types of collection in the book -– microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us –- are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person."

"A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be."

"The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance, and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying."

"I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous."

"All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."

"If I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now."

"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American"

"This country is worth dying for."

"Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper - the Director of National Intelligence - baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed."

"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."

"Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it."

"I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded."

"The government and intelligence services of the United States of America have attempted to make an example of me, a warning to all others who might speak out as I have. I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression."

"No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused."

"There have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break the law."

"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."

"It is we who infuse life with meaning through our actions and the stories we create with them."

"And history also shows that seemingly ordinary people who are sufficiently resolute about justice can triumph over the most formidable adversaries."

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

"When you say I don’t care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide, that is no different than saying I don’t care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write."

"Simply because you are following the law, doesn't mean that you'll be exempt from governmental interference in your private life."

"The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities that we've ever seen in history. Now, what they will argue, is that they don't use this for nefarious purposes against American citizens. In some ways, that's true but the real problem is that they're using these capabilities to make us vulnerable to them and then saying, 'well I have a gun pointed at your head. I'm not going to pull the trigger. Trust me.'"

"Abandoning open society for fear of terrorism is the only way to be defeated by it."

"Privacy is the right to a free mind."

"Saying that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. It’s a deeply anti social principle because rights are not just individual, they’re collective, and what may not have value to you today may have value to an entire population, an entire people, an entire way of life tomorrow. And if you don’t stand up for it, then who will?"

"Politics: the art of convincing decent people to forget the lesser of two evils is also evil."

"There are no heroes, just heroic decisions"

"What does the Office of Information Sharing do? Well...Think about someone who’s supposed to know all the secrets to everything... When they say, “I need to know what’s going on with this,” or, “Show me this program,” somebody has to get that, right? They don’t know how to get it themselves. And that means somebody has all the access as these directors have all of these other things... I was sitting, for the first time in my career, really, with absolute awareness, not of the little picture, but the big picture, how all the pieces fit together. And I created a system called the HEARTBEAT... new technological platform... that pulls from all of these different newspapers and says, “Here’s what’s interesting for you, based on who you are,”... a kind of crude proof of concept system to do this... this meant that I now was sitting on top of a mountain of secrets. And it turned out that a lot of those secrets were criminal. So now I had to find a way to collect the evidence of wrongdoing, get it out of one of the most highly secured buildings on the planet...and somehow get it to journalists without getting caught."

"I think some of the reporting that WikiLeaks has done is tremendously important, both for the historic record and also for contemporary politics... what had happened in the wake of the 2009 Manning disclosures — this is where WikiLeaks published the “Collateral Murder” video of U.S. helicopter pilots killing not just a journalist, but also the first responders that came to their aid, and the classified histories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the State Department’s diplomatic cables, that in some ways are argued to have sort of helped spark or at least catalyze the Arab Spring movement. What had happened is, in the early parts of WikiLeaks’ reporting, they worked in concert with newspapers, with sort of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel — major newspapers. angered the troops” — which has never borne out, by the way. We’re now more than 10 years on from those activities, and the government, even at Chelsea Manning’s trial, after they’ve convicted her, the government was invited by the judge to show evidence of harm, and they couldn’t show anyone was harmed as a result of the disclosures."

"The end of it, the finish line, was you’ve delivered the secret to journalists, that the government has violated the rights of Americans and the Constitution of the United States. They can then publish that information, and that was the end of the process... And so, then, when the story comes out — and my biggest fear was this was going to be a two-day story that everybody stopped talking about, it just blew over, the government sort of suppressed it — it became the biggest story on the planet that year. Suddenly, everybody was interested... The government made me public enemy number one. I was the most wanted man in the world. 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...”"

"If you ever wonder where we're at on the dystopia scale, consider that it's normal to believe the government is spying on you, and crazy to believe that they're not."

"I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them."

"It turns out "Hey Alexa" is short for "Hey Keith Alexander." Yes, the Keith Alexander personally responsible for the unlawful mass surveillance programs that caused a global scandal. And Amazon Web Services (AWS) host ~6% of all websites."

"There's good cops out there. I had a lot of interactions with cops as a young man that were nothing but positive. It's not that the police as an idea are the enemy. It is the system is that is rotten... i think even honest cops recognize that the system is fundamentally broken.... There are a lot of cops who've given their lives to stop very bad people... we should honor them... we should provide for their families... but the way that we do that is by providing a better society that's more fair to police by being more fair to everyone... As long as we have an occupation that is invested with extreme authority, they must be invested with an extraordinary standard of accountability. It's that simple from my perspective.... Today in the world of business.. government... policing... anywhere you look it's a common issue. What we have is a disproportionate allocation of influence... of economic resources... a disproportionate allocation of authority without an equal allocation of responsibility. (~2:09:10)"

"Are people aware of the extent of the intrusion? Are people aware of what is happening? And is it necessary? Is it something they consented to? And I think for the vast majority of people, the answer is no.... Z"