Katharine Gun Quotes

Instead of focusing on Snowden and shooting the messenger, we should really focus on the crimes of the NSA [National Security Agency]. Whatever laws Snowden may or may not have broken, they are infinitesimally small compared to the two major surveillance laws and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution that the NSA violated.

To say the U.S. government is targeting U.S. persons, to listen to their phone calls and read their emails, is just false.

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.

Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations

The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

When the 'New York Times' revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous.

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 Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.

With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.

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

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.

What I believe is that a lot of the NSA's telephone metadata program is the result of misinformation spread by a traitor, Edward Snowden.

Snowden is not the disease. We don't have traitors or whistleblowers blooming all over because they are some sort of malady. The disease is war. We've been at war now and with no end in sight for over a dozen years, the longest in our history. War breeds tyranny. War breeds people who want to prosecute and persecute those who reveal that tyranny. So what we have is the government becoming more draconian - clearly understandable. It always does in a period of war. And as it becomes more draconian, more and more whistleblowers coming.

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 see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves-with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement)-to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveilla nce state

The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing. We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk. They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.

When you have mass surveillance, it's impossible to meet the intent of the First Amendment because reporters can't talk to sources because sources are afraid to talk.

In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.

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.

The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.

We've got the NSA getting logs of every call you make. The IRS is weaponized like Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.

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

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.