Edward Snowden Quotes

When Clapper raised his hand and lied to the American public, was anyone tried? Were any charges brought? Within 24 hours of going public, I had three charges against me.

There's no saving me.

If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they'll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.

We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

We watch our own people more closely than anyone else in the world.

There is a policy response that needs to occur. There is also a technical response that needs to occur. It is the development community that can really craft the solutions and make sure we are safe.

Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.

These activities can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, and used to harm you as an individual even without the government having any intent to do you wrong.

I'm still working for the government.

There's a real danger in the way our representative government functions today. It functions properly only when paired with accountability.

We should know at least the broad strokes of the powers that the government's claiming in our name, and using allegedly, on our behalf. And also against us as well.

Americans hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

In America, we collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage.

All I was was a mechanism.

We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.

The [Barack] Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They're afraid of death by a thousand cuts - you know, leaks and things like that.

I'm familiar with Andrei Sakharov reputation, but I don't know his personal history at all.

They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.

I'm ultimately satisfied that we know a little bit more about how the world really works.

Nobody's going to vote for Isis.

We can't simply scare people into giving up their rights, on the basis, oh, this protects us from terrorism.

If we can't have an open and honest debate about the value of ideas in a university in Glasgow, or Boston, or anywhere else in the world, then where are they going to go?

When I talk about the polling, I'm talking about the principles. It shows these officials are knowingly attempting to shift public opinion, even though they know what they say is not factual.

Extremists are not going to disappear.

Now terrorism is not the greatest threat facing our societies.

I hate these questions - I don't like talking about this stuff [popular culture], because it's so... to me, it's so ordinary.

I've got more than enough for my needs [for social life in Moscow], let's put it that way.

We've got crazy little sites going up against established media behemoths.

What we're seeing now, or starting to see, is an atomization of the Internet community. Before, everybody went only to a few sites; now we've got all these boutiques.

I'm not an anarchist. I'm not saying, "Burn it to the ground."

[Bill] Binney designed ThinThread, an NSA program that used encryption to try to make mass surveillance less objectionable. It would still have been unlawful and unconstitutional.

I don't think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators Tom] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.

We have to confront the reality of our world, and make the hard decisions about which way we want to move forward.

By putting these sort of lines around what ideas are proper or improper, we lose things.

When it comes to social policies, I believe women have the right to make their own choices, and inequality is a really important issue.

I don't go out and play football and stuff - that's not me. I want to think, I want to build, I want to talk, I want to create.

It doesn't need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that.

US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn't be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory.

Do we want to emulate China in the way that China emulates the West? I think, for most Americans, the answer to that question would be no.

In the United States, there hasn't been much legislative change on the surveillance issue, although there are some tepid proposals.

We are a representative democracy. But how did we get there? We got there through direct action. And that's enshrined in our Constitution and in our values.

We have the right of revolution. Revolution does not always have to be weapons and warfare; it's also about revolutionary ideas.

A given order may at any given time fail to represent those values, even work against those values. I think that's the dynamic we're seeing today.

We have these traditional political parties that are less and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people, so people are in search of their own values.

If the government or the parties won't address our needs, we will. It's about direct action, even civil disobedience.

Until we reform our laws and until we fix the excesses of these old policies that we inherited in the post-9/11 era, we're not going to be able to put the security back in the NSA.

US has to be able to rely on a safe and interconnected internet in order to compete with other countries.

When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future, we're going to know that that's a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.

Defending ourselves from internet-based attacks, internet-originated attacks, is much, much more important than our ability to launch attacks against similar targets in foreign countries.