Edward Snowden Quotes
Privacy matters. Privacy allows us to determine who we are and what we want to be.
Edward Snowden, NSA & CIA Employee, Whistleblower & Leaker of Classified Information, Christmas Message, Moscow, December 26, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Israel, like the UK, does not have a constitution or bill of rights per se, and laws passed by the Knesset serve the role of enumerating rights.
He was trying to assuage the anger and anxiety when it became public that the NSA had been monitoring all the calls of American citizens and not only suspected terrorists. He made the distinction between metadata and content. He claimed NSA was gathering the phone numbers of the parties on the call, the time and duration, but not listening in to the contents. Critics asked how he could be sure and that if the agency were gathering all the data, they could easily listen to any. Later the agency admitted that it had “inadvertently” examined the content of some communications.
The call for embedding the balance in the law is in contrast to the past where the balance was left to the discretion of the intelligence agency leadership but technological limitations curtailed their ability to unbalance things too much.
Edward Joseph Snowden is a former computer intelligence consultant who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.
