Edward Snowden Quotes

As long as government is allowed to collect all Internet data, the perceived exigency will drive honest civil servants to reach more broadly and deeply into our networked lives.

Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.

That's not how national security works... I don't care what the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we the private citizens!

The domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition. The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism. Accepting that bargain enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom - "he who does not move does not notice his chains," observed Rosa Luxemburg - but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.

Privacy isn't negotiable. It's the right of every American.

I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test.

It's never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to 'control protestors' - especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent.

Americans don’t need a big government to read their e-mail and track what else they do

If we give up all our privacy rights, have we become any safer?

I can’t allow the U. S. Government to destroy privacy and basic liberties.

The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.

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.

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

After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.

When we think in the context of the last decade's infringements upon personal liberty and the last year's revelations, it's not about surveillance. It's about liberty.

The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone's communications.

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers - and not to tell you about it.

We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

You talked about national identity cards and the terrorism bill. We have made a government that has grown used to viewing us as subjects, has grown used to seeing its role as commanding us.

There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world.

Bringing an end to mass government surveillance needs to be a central pillar of returning to the principles we have put in jeopardy in the early 21st century.

I never thought I'd see the day when the U.S. government could listen in on phone conversations or read private mail without first obtaining a warrant from a court. That sounds more like something that happened in the Soviet Union.

There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.