Edward Snowden Quotes

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

Ever since 9/11, our intelligence agencies, as part of the 'war on terror,' have expanded their operations to include American citizens. I was 'terrorized' when I learned that the National Security Agency was intercepting information on Americans.

There is a huge difference between gathering intelligence in foreign countries, even our allies, and secretly getting information on U.S. citizens.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.

For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.

How will we defend ourselves if the Patriot Act expires? Well, perhaps we could just rely on the Constitution and demonstrate exactly how traditional judicial warrants can gather all the info we need - and how bulk collection really hasn't worked.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion … and you allow him to make war at pleasure. … If today he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may see no probability he would say to you, “Be silent!, I see if you don’t.”

There isn’t any doubt that in fighting the War on Terrorism you increase the power and scope of government, and it becomes more intrusive.

With 450,000 U.S. troops now in Vietnam, it is time that Congress decided whether or not to declare a state of war exists with North Vietnam

… there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the... telephony meta-data program.

The National Security Agency vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from or within the United States.

The NSA surveillance programs have crossed the line of proportionality. Even if one could conceivably justify the initial inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders, their continued storage in Government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how the information will be used in the future?

The Obama administration has framed its defense of the controversial bulk collection of all American phone records as necessary to prevent a future 9/11.

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.

No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us.

The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.

The NSA is not listening to anyone's phone calls. They're not reading any Americans' e-mails. They're collecting simply the data that your phone company already has, and which you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, so they can search that data quickly in the event of a terrorist plot.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights.

You've got the NSA doing all this collecting of material on all of its citizens - that's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did.