Edward Snowden Quotes

I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

Today in Germany, everyone is being watched--even the watchers.

What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA's own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. Intelligence agencies are looking at phone numbers and durations of calls; they are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.

One can doubt the sincerity of the technology community’s outrage over the NSA’s surveillance practices—doubt, for example, that the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company reportedly stores petabytes’ worth of data about its billion-plus active monthly users, was shocked at the thought of mass data collection.

My well-discussed 'paranoia' urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice.

It is important to note that Edward Snowden was labeled as a spy not a whistle-blower - even though he exposed the reach of the spy services into the lives of most Americans. More importantly, he was denounced as being part of a generation that unfortunately combined being educated with a distrust of authority.

The key question: will the NSA continue to monitor hundreds of millions of people without any suspicion? Under Obama's proposals: Yes.

stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.

I was thinking about how people were upset about the information that came out from Snowden about the NSA - many people were upset, including myself. But I was kind of surprised by how little we did about it - how little fighting we did.

If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government's been hiding.

I think it's a mistake to downgrade and say surveillance is no big deal. It is a huge deal that we are collecting millions of Americans phone calls and that someone can go to a keyboard and put your name in and search it without a warrant.

The TSA tears through your bags at the airport and the NSA watches what books you buy and what you say over the telephone and online. It doesn't feel like anything is private anymore.

What the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation. They want to have a perfect record of the last five years of your life, so when you come to their attention, they can know everything about you. I'm not down with that, but [Bill] Binney was trying to create something like that.

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about.

The NSA has thrown Silicon Valley under the bus.

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people's Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.

At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the U.S. to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the U.S. The NSA lies about what it stores.

The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people.

I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people.

Look at it this way: this administration is taking unprecedented steps to make sure that the government's secrets remain private while simultaneously invading the privacy of its citizens... Many innocents must be violated so that a few guilty people can be stopped. It's a digital stop-and-frisk.

When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.

If we don't do anything, if we go along with the status quo, we are going to have a mass surveillance world.