When I came forward in 2013, I said the reason that I came … - Edward Snowden

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When I came forward in 2013, I said the reason that I came forward was that we have a right to know that which is done to us and that which is done in our name by our governments. That was already under threat. And when you look at the world since, it seems that that trend is accelerating. Do we still have that right? Do we have any rights if we don’t defend them? Well, today we see someone who has stood up to defend that right, who has aggressively championed that right, at an extreme cost. And it’s time for us to defend his rights.

Edward Snowden

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About Edward Snowden

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American former technical contractor for the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who leaked details of several top-secret U.S. and British government mass surveillance programs to the press. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments. Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post. Further disclosures were made by other publications including Der Spiegel and The New York Times. In September 2022, Snowden was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin.

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Birth Name: Edward Joseph Snowden

Alternative Names: Ed Snowden • Edward J. Snowden

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Julian Assange Heather Brooke William O. Douglas Noam Chomsky Glenn Greenwald

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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.

And for us to hear that today, to begin with, should just, you know, raise the hairs on the back of our neck a little bit and go, why do we have any rights? What are rights for? If we're in a democracy - right?

The United States is probably the only advanced democracy in the world that does not have a basic privacy law.

When I came forward in 2013, I said the reason that I came forward was that we have a right to know that which is done to us and that which is done i… - Edward Snowden

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