Alex Berenson Quotes

Some say Edward Snowden is a hero and a patriot. Others say he's a fool and a traitor. The evidence is mounting that the guy who leaked the details about the National Security Agency's Internet-eavesdropping program may be something more sinister - namely, a willing tool in China's ongoing cyberwar against our nation.

There should be at least one leak like the Pentagon Papers every year.

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

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.

What Edward Snowden did amounted to the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of my nation.

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

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.

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.

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

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

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.

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.

Some things simply cannot leak. And if they do leak, the government has to do something about it.

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.

I've never met Snowden, I've never spoken with him personally. I mean, he's extremely smart. Very, very smart. I guess he was a lot less naive than I was.

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

Leaking of classified material is a concern.

When I served in the Army, along the Iron Curtain we had a word for a person who absconds with information and provides it to another nation: traitor. We also had a name for a person who chooses to reveal secrets he had personally promised to protect: common criminal.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

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

WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Logs and U.S. diplomatic cables stolen from a classified network by an Army private.

Mr. Snowden is a coward who has chosen to run.

For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge.

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