Glenn Greenwald Quotes

But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers [by Huawei], foreign organizations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones.

More remarkable is the fact that in country after country, revelations that the NSA was spying on hundreds of millions of their citizens produced little more than muted objections from their political leadership. True indignation came gushing forward only once those leaders understood that they, and not just their citizens, had been targeted as well.

Thus, for all the government's denials, the NSA has no substantial constraints on whom it can spy and how. [...] The NSA is the definitive rogue agency: empowered to do whatever it wants with very little control, transparency, or accountability.

Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.

Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the [United States] government had striven to show people around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda.

History leaved no doubt that collective coercion and control is both the intent and effect of state surveillance.

[The first article about NSA surveillance] "It's everywhere," Snowden said, clearly excited. "I watched all your interviews. Everyone seemed to get it."

But when it became clear that Obama was not just continuing, but in many cases expanding these abuses", he said. "I realized then that I couldn't wait for a leader to fix these things. Leadership is about acting first and serving as an example for others, not waiting for others to act.

Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only antidote.

To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.

Over the pasty decades, the fear of terrorism—stoked by consistent exaggerations of the actual threat—has been exploited by US leaders to justify a weird array of extremist policies.

No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. [...] A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.

[About Twitter being banned in Brazil, Pavel Durov being arrested in France, and Rumble being blocked in Brazil and France:] You see this rapidly escalating, unfolding extremely menacing scheme of censorship which is 'You either remove every dissident, every idea, that we don't like, that we deem false, that we deem harmful, or we will, in the case of France, imprison you and your executives the minute you step foot into the EU, or we'll just block your entire platform from being available in our country at all. And we will only allow those platforms that maintain a closed system of information for our citizens to hear and say only what we think they should be hearing and saying.' This is happening in the democratic world, the obstensibly Western Democratic world. I cannot do anything more in terms of words to express how extreme, how severe, and how dangerous this trend is. We could see it coming for several years now and it is here.

It's so ironic they [the Democratic Party] spent four years claiming they are fighting fascism and authoritarianism, and what are they trying to do now? They're trying to harness corporate and monopoly power to silence everyone who disagrees with them, the very hallmark, the epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting, but which in reality they embody.

Don't even try that pathetic tactic. Huge numbers of people are disgusted by what you're doing. She's a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors & half-Mexican. And maybe as a gay Jew, I also have a personal stake in who is and isn't an actual Nazi. You don't own this discourse.