Glenn Greenwald Quotes

What many commentators have missed in the ongoing attack on Edward Snowden is not that he uncovered information that made clear how corrupt and intrusive the American government has become - how willing it is to engage in vast crimes against the American public.

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire U.S. government is forced to go through a full-body scanner.

We would not have a national discussion without the actions of Edward Snowden. Democracy is at work because of Edward Snowden.

The Snowden leaks were important – a legitimate scoop – and we might never have known about the NSA’s law breaking if it had not been for them.

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

I worked with people like Edward Snowden. Well, not people who took stuff home.

We should stop thinking of Snowden, to the extent that we ever were, as a hero. We should stop thinking of him as a whistleblower.

What we do with the information now is up to us, but certainly I have a lot of respect for the courage and integrity that was required for [Edard Snowden] to take that action.

Clearly we must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack, but we can and must do so in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society. We can do that without living in an Orwellian world where the government and private corporations know every telephone call that we make, every website we visit, everyplace we go.

It didn't really change my opinion about [Edward] Snowden all that much, but I definitely feel like as a culture, it gave us information that generated a responsibility to protect ourselves as much as we can and also a responsibility to hold our government accountable to honoring our constitutional rights.

I think you just learn a lot of stuff in general about all the stuff he [Edward Snowden] released. I think there's probably a lot that we don't know. That's what is really interesting.

The subject of Citizenfour, Edward Snowden, could not be here for some treason.

Scott's Eastwood movie Snowden sounds fascinating. I want to see it because it's about deserting your country ... for whatever reasons you have. Edward Snowden became famous for the wrong reasons, as Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger became famous for doing something spectacular.

My understanding is that espionage means giving secret or classified information to the enemy. Since Snowden shared information with the American people, his indictment for espionage could reveal (or confirm) that the US Government views you and me as the enemy.

Snowden has yet to tell me anything that was a fact that I have been able to rebut or that anybody in the U.S. government I have talked to has been able to rebut.

I wonder if 50 years from now we'll look back, and maybe Julian Assange will be the hero and J. Edgar Hoover will be the enemy of the state.

It's sad to think right now, but probably the Russian and Chinese government know more about Hillary Clinton's e-mail server than do the members of the United States Congress. And - and that has put our national security at risk.

Privacy is tremendously important. I believe the American people, and all people, should be skeptical of government power, should ask hard questions: What is the authority? What is the oversight? That's the way it ought to be.

In the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.

It appears to the American people that the government is intent on prying into every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, while at the same time doing all that it can to block access to government information that would inform the American people what is being done in their name.

When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security.

Secrecy at the level of the individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret.

I want to make it clear … that America is not interested in spying on ordinary citizens.