Edward Snowden Quotes

And then they sell... or... rent this capability. Facebook says they don't sell data, which is absurd because...they're collecting all of the data and then they're selling... to the highest bidder... what they're selling is access to your eyeballs...access to your mind.... It's you being exploited, and you don't see it happening....

When Facebook is sort of grinding down your privacy, you don't see it. And although you will feel it, you won't feel it for years.... these companies have quietly created perfect records of everything you've done, everywhere you've gone, everything you've clicked, everything you've liked, how long you've stayed on a page, you know, when you had to scroll up to reread a section. All of that is captured, and they use this to model ways to influence your behavior to actually shape and manipulate the decisions you make as a human being.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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...”

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.

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.

There are no heroes, just heroic decisions

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

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?

Privacy is the right to a free mind.

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