Whistleblowers

"I have my country and my convictions. And I don't want to renounce either my country or my convictions. And I cannot betray either the first or the second. If your convictions are worth anything, you should be ready to stand up for them. And, if necessary, make some sacrifices. And if you're not ready, then you have no convictions at all. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles – just thoughts in your head."

"Putin is not Russia. And if there is anything in Russia right now that you can be most proud of, it is those 6,824 people who were detained because - without any call - they took to the streets with placards saying "No War". They say that someone who cannot attend a rally and does not risk being arrested for it cannot call for it. I'm already in prison, so I think I can. We cannot wait any longer. Wherever you are, in Russia, Belarus or on the other side of the planet, go to the main square of your city every weekday and at 2 pm on weekends and holidays. If you are abroad, come to the Russian embassy. If you can organise a demonstration, do so on the weekend. Yes, maybe only a few people will take to the streets on the first day. And in the second - even less. But we must, gritting our teeth and overcoming fear, come out and demand an end to the war. Each arrested person must be replaced by two newcomers. If in order to stop the war we have to fill prisons and paddy wagons with ourselves, we will fill prisons and paddy wagons with ourselves. Everything has a price, and now, in the spring of 2022, we must pay this price. There's no one to do it for us. Let's not "be against the war." Let's fight against the war."

"I traveled across the country and declared from the stage everywhere, "I promise, I will not let you down, I will not deceive you, and I will not abandon you." By returning, I fulfilled my promise to my voters. After all, there must eventually be those in Russia who do not lie to them."

"The inner compass of Alexei Navalny tells Alexei Navalny where to go. Everything else is uninteresting to me."

"I had this cliché moment of a Russian émigré abroad: I really missed black bread. I know it’s stupid, but I really missed it."

"[F]orgive me if this sounds pompous, but it’s better to die standing up than live on your knees."

"Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power, to not give up, to remember that we are a huge power, that is being repressed by these bad dudes. We don’t realize how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive."

"[N]ow, secretarians and marginals are in power. Generally, they have no ideas. Their only goal is to cling to their seats. Perfected hypocrisy allows them to adapt and adopt any disguise, thus polygamists have become conservatives, members of the Communist Party have become Orthodox Christians, owners of golden passports and offshore accounts have become aggressive patriots. Lies, lies, and nothing but lies. It will collapse and fall apart. Putin's state is unviable. One day, we'll look at its place and it will be gone. Victory is inevitable. But for now, we must not give up, and hold on to our convictions."

"No one should be beaten. [Instead,] everything that bothers us should be carefully, but unyieldingly eliminated by means of deportation... A tooth without a root is considered dead. A nationalist is he who does not want the root ‘Russian’ to be deleted from the word ‘Russia.’ We have the right to be Russian in Russia and we will protect this right."

"[I]f tomorrow ten businessmen spoke up directly and openly we'd live in a different country. Starting tomorrow."

"We have problems with illegal migration, we have the problem of the Caucasus, we have a problem of ethnic crimes... the fact that our authorities hypocritically pretend that such problems do not exist leads to people discussing them only in the street, at the Russian March."

"Russian politics over the last decade [has] so inculcated society with cynicism and conspiracy theory that people fundamentally do not believe in simple motives."

"For three years, I've been answering the same question. Inmates ask it plainly and directly. Prison administration staff cautiously, with the recorders off. "Why did you come back?""

"We — Russia — want to be a nation of peace. Alas, few people would call us that now. But let's at least not become a nation of frightened silent people. Of cowards who pretend not to notice the aggressive war against Ukraine unleashed by our obviously insane czar. I cannot, do not want and will not remain silent watching how pseudo-historical nonsense about the events of 100 years ago has become an excuse for Russians to kill Ukrainians, and for Ukrainians to kill Russians while defending themselves. It's the third decade of the 21st century, and we are watching news about people burning down in tanks and bombed houses. We are watching real threats to start a nuclear war on our TVs. I am from the USSR myself. I was born there. And the main phrase from there — from my childhood — was "fight for peace." I call on everyone to take to the streets and fight for peace."

"I think very poorly of United Russia. United Russia is the party of corruption, the party of crooks and thieves. And it is the duty of every patriot and citizen of our country to make sure that this party is destroyed."

"I have grown a beard for the 20 days of my transportation. Unfortunately, there are no reindeer, but there are huge fluffy, and very beautiful shepherd dogs. And the most important thing: I now live above the Arctic Circle. In the village of Kharp on Yamal. The nearest town has the beautiful name of Labytnangi. I don't say "Ho-ho-ho", but I do say "Oh-oh-oh" when I look out of the window, where I can see a night, then the evening, and then the night again. The 20 days of my transportation were pretty exhausting, but I'm still in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus. They brought me here on Saturday night. And I was transported with such precaution and on such a strange route (Vladimir - Moscow - Chelyabinsk - Ekaterinburg - Kirov - Vorkuta - Kharp) that I didn't expect anyone to find me here before mid-January. That's why I was very surprised when the cell door was opened yesterday with the words: "A lawyer is here to see you". He told me that you had lost me, and some of you were even worried. Thanks very much for your support! … Anyway, don't worry about me. I'm fine. I'm totally relieved that I've finally made it. Thanks again to everyone for your support. And happy holidays!"

"Speaking out cost me my job, my marriage and my happiness at the time, but it also helped save the lives of thousands and thousands of people."

"Countless families were broken apart and ruined by AIDS, leaving many AIDS orphans. They had no one to turn to."

"Trump will wrap his arms around bogus claims like they are old friends, and he doesn't care if the person spewing them is a fraud, as long as their words serve whatever purpose Trump has in mind at the moment. One of his favorite sources for news analysis is Lou Dobbs, a once-respected Fox host whose late-night show is now riddled with conspiracy theories and wild speculation about current events. The president goes to bed with Lou's ideas floating in his mind, whether it's conjecture about liberal billionaire George Soros or ideas for new Justice Department investigations. We know this because he regularly brings Lou's ideas into the Oval Office the next morning, demanding that they be implemented the way Lou said they should be. I can't think of another elected leader in this country who is so easily lured in by obvious carnival barkers."

"This is nothing but a political persecution. It`s not even an investigation. This is purely and straightforwardly an assault. I want to talk about what these lazy, indolent, passive son of a guns can do on a declaration of war against the radical dems against the president and the American republic."

"[ Trump needs to take drastic action], dramatic action to make certain that the integrity of this election is understood or lack of it, the crimes that have been committed against him and the American people. And if the Justice Department doesn’t want to do it, if the FBI cannot do it, then we have to find other resources within the federal government"

"While the president pleased few of his supporters, if any, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the radical Dems [are] taking victory laps within minutes of the president’s 18-minute announcement And the illegal immigrants are surely pleased at the prospect they may soon jump to the front of the line while legal immigrants aren't even part of the discussion in the nation's capital"

"Dobbs was best known for anchoring CNN’s “Moneyline,” an early and influential program that helped create the televised financial-news genre. On “Moneyline,” Dobbs featured corporate CEOs and generally lauded them. About five years ago, Dobbs began changing his line, invoking populist rhetoric and championing the cause of the middle class. He thematically titled his coverage “War on the Middle Class” and “Broken Borders.” Dobbs’ signature issue of undocumented immigrants, or, as he calls them, illegal aliens, has tremendous influence on the debate nationally. So it matters if he is wrong...he must be held responsible for not bringing a historical context to this crucial discussion of immigration reform. The immigration issue will not be solved by vilifying a population."

"What I fear is a new direction for the president and his administration and what could very likely be a catastrophe for the working men and women, small business and entrepreneurs, our middle class, the American family, the very people this president has represented from the moment he announced he would run for the presidency. That Mr. Trump would advance the interest of the globalist elites ahead of our citizens would be a tragic reversal on any day, But today, on the same day the Commerce Department reported the United States had the largest trade deficit in our history ... it all means the White House has simply lost its way. The nation’s heart will be, after all, broken by the very same people who brought 50 years of consecutive trade deficit and the export of millions of middle-class jobs and who have fed the swamp for decades"

"They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after U.S. international–U.S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups. So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff."

"If Pompeo failed to report back to you on the conversation you instructed him to have with Binney, you might ask him about it now (even though the flimsy evidence of Russia hacking the DNC has now evaporated, with Binney vindicated). There were two note-takers present at the October 24, 2017 meeting at CIA headquarters. There is also a good chance the session was also recorded. You might ask Pompeo about that... Binney had the impression Pompeo was simply going through the motions — and disingenuously, at that. If he “really wanted to know about Russian hacking,” he would have acquainted himself with the conclusions that VIPS, with Binney in the lead, had reached in mid-2017, and which apparently caught your eye.... Had he pursued the matter seriously with Binney, we might not have had to wait until the Justice Department itself put nails in the coffin of Russiagate, CrowdStrike, and Comey. In sum, Pompeo could have prevented two additional years of “everyone knows that the Russians hacked into the DNC.” Why did he not?... Binney describes himself as a “country boy” from western Pennsylvania. He studied at Penn State and became a world renowned mathematician/cryptologist as well as a technical director at NSA. Binney’s accomplishments are featured in a documentary on YouTube, “A Good American.” You may wish to talk to him person-to-person... We are at your disposal, should you wish to discuss any of this with us."

"In our Memorandum to you of July 24, 2017 entitled “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?,” we suggested: “You may wish to ask CIA Director Mike Pompeo what he knows about this..." Three months later, Director Pompeo invited William Binney, one of VIPS’ two former NSA technical directors...to CIA headquarters to discuss our findings. Pompeo began an hour-long meeting with Binney on October 24, 2017 by explaining the genesis of the unusual invitation: “You are here because the President told me that if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk to you.” But Did Pompeo ‘Really Want to Know’? Apparently not. Binney, a widely respected, plain-spoken scientist with more than three decades of experience at NSA, began by telling Pompeo that his (CIA) people were lying to him about Russian hacking and that he (Binney) could prove it. As we explained in our most recent Memorandum to you, Pompeo reacted with disbelief and — now get this — tried to put the burden on Binney to pursue the matter with the FBI and NSA. As for Pompeo himself, there is no sign he followed up by pursuing Binney’s stark observation with anyone..."

"Incompetence at this scale, when they're doing things at this scale, is really dangerous, you could end up on a kill list without knowing what the criteria is to get on there or what the criteria is to get off."

"(referring to phone numbers stored in a database of phone and email records) Since '1' identifies anyone in the regional zone 1 of the world, that's the US, Canada and some of the islands - it's right there in the front of your white pages book ... all they have to do is use that as a base of knowledge to go in to their entire database and count all of the phone numbers there that had a one in them, right-and then the ones are in the United States and then they'd have a count of how many Americans are in the database and how often each one's there. And yet they claim they can't do that, which is false. You can do the same thing with email, with service providers, IPs and things like that."

"No online cipher is safe, simply because if they don't have the key they'll come across and get it from you. Assuming they didn't already implant it in the system"

"Sixteen months before the attacks on America, our organisation [Signit Automation Research Center – Sarc] was running a new method of finding terrorist networks that worked on focusing on ‘smart collection’. Their plan was rejected in favour of a much more expensive plan to collect all communications from everyone."

"This approach costs lives, and has cost lives in Britain because it inundates analysts with too much data. It is 99% useless. Who wants to know everyone who has ever [been] at Google or the BBC? We have known for decades that that swamps analysts,"

"The US large-scale surveillance plan failed. It had to be abandoned in 2005. Checks afterwards showed that communications from the terrorists had been collected, but not looked at in time."

"I found out later that, NSA had approached the telecommunications companies in February of 2001, this is 8 months before 9/11 asking for all the customer data, that is the billing data on phone calls made from US citizens to other US citizens. In fact, the entire customer set. So, and that's fundamentally what they did after 9/11, here they were asking 8 months before. And what that meant to me was that this was the design from the beginning that management had made the plans to spy on the United States and people in the United States even before 9/11. Ok, then, when 9/11 occurred, that was the pure excuse for them to go in and say, 'now, telecoms, we really need the data now, to be able to do this to be, to protect the United States from terrorism.' and that was simply false to begin with. We had no problem at all identifying these people from the beginning."

"In the early summer, the Russians started to train or exercise along the border with Czechoslovakia. I started looking at the communications they were using to move around and that's when I started to pick up some very small number of unique things that was different from a normal training programme. So I started to capture that, and I said: it's obvious that they're going to invade. It was only two days later that they actually invaded"

"This is the research we did online for the 9/11 attacks ... we gave this briefing internally at the CIA, they said, 'how'd you know all this stuff?' because at the same time one of the emails had the date ... 9/11 as the attack date that was given"

"I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others."

"If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

"The episode of Chelsea Manning and the Harvard Institute of Politics fellowship is instructive. You may recall that Bradley Manning, as he was known back when serving as a low-level United States Army intelligence analyst, chose to violate his oath and betray his country. He downloaded an astonishing quantity of classified information about the American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and sent it all to WikiLeaks. Manning was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for nearly seven years. Deservedly so. From a reputational standpoint, that probably should have been the end of it. But it was not: the prisoner Bradley Manning became Chelsea Manning, a transgender woman, and the societal forces that endorse and celebrate victimhood transformed a wartime traitor into a persecuted hero. When Chelsea Manning emerged from prison in May 2017, the perceptual transformation was complete."

"As the late Howard Zinn once said, "There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.""

"In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror."

"Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission."

"Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy -- the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps -- to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light."

"The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seeming delightful blood-lust the aerial weapons team happened to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life, and referred to them as quote-unquote 'dead bastards,' and congratulated each other on their ability to kill in large numbers. ... For me, this seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass....I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained [in the leaks], it could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.""

"This was the background to the announcement on September 13, 2017, when Chelsea Manning received a visiting fellowship at the Harvard Institute of Politics. A prestigious institution was taking on board a controversial progressive celebrity- despite the fact that Manning had no experience in the very thing that the Institute of Politics specialized in: politics. Manning didn't even know much about national security, considering her time in the Army was brief and low-level. There was no evidence whatsoever that Manning's qualifications met the standard for such a position. What exactly were students expected to learn from her? How to betray their country? But Chelsea Manning was a persecuted "whistleblower" turned LBGTQ activist- and so Chelsea Manning was receiving elite institutional approval. It was victimhood worship manifested into reality at one of our country's most preeminent institutions."

"It turns out that being on the left and having actual principles isn't very profitable."

"This is the thing about the right, is that they just wanna win. If there's anything I've learned from being around people on the far-right my entire life, it is that they just wanna own libs. They just want their enemies to lose. And if that means killing themselves in the process, then yeah, let's go!"

"The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We've been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we've had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life."

"Manning's leak gave Reuters, and the world, a graphic view of the horror of modern war, of the violent death of two media workers in the line of duty... Manning took incredibly courageous actions to release data, to pierce the fog of war, to make public the machinations of modern American war-making. Edward Snowden has exposed the sophistication and extraordinary reach of the US surveillance state, cracking down on those who would dare to release information. And Julian Assange sits within the four walls of his embassy redoubt, persecuted for the crime of publishing. Yet those who planned the wars, those who committed war crimes, those who conduct illegal spying, for now, walk free."

"I don't cooperate with grand juries or the police ever. That's just my standard policy."