Edward Snowden Quotes

If we don't do anything, if we go along with the status quo, we are going to have a mass surveillance world.

The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

We are not any safer through the bulk collection of all Americans' records.

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

I think it's a mistake to downgrade and say surveillance is no big deal. It is a huge deal that we are collecting millions of Americans phone calls and that someone can go to a keyboard and put your name in and search it without a warrant.

What we're really debating is not security versus liberty, it's security versus surveillance. When we talk about electronic interception, the way that surveillance works is it preys on the weakness of protections that are being applied to all of our communications. The manner in which they're protected.

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.

… the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information.

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

One can doubt the sincerity of the technology community’s outrage over the NSA’s surveillance practices—doubt, for example, that the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company reportedly stores petabytes’ worth of data about its billion-plus active monthly users, was shocked at the thought of mass data collection.

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

The government can spy on people using their mobile phones while they're with their wives and husbands.

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.

stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.

I was thinking about how people were upset about the information that came out from Snowden about the NSA - many people were upset, including myself. But I was kind of surprised by how little we did about it - how little fighting we did.

Today in Germany, everyone is being watched--even the watchers.

It certainly woke me up to how vulnerable we all are. I think I was much more cavalier about it before I started working on the movie [Edward Snowden], and then the more I read the documents themselves and saw just how sweeping and indiscriminate the intrusions into our privacy have been, it made me more aware.

Corporate and government surveillance aren't separate; they're an alliance of interests.

Look at it this way: this administration is taking unprecedented steps to make sure that the government's secrets remain private while simultaneously invading the privacy of its citizens... Many innocents must be violated so that a few guilty people can be stopped. It's a digital stop-and-frisk.

I was aware of it but I think I was aware of it abstractly, theoretically. You know I understood who Edward Snowden was and what he did but I didn't really see the relevance that it bore in my life and doing film changed that tune pretty quick.

As our voices rise in protest, the NSA monitors your every phone call. if you have a cell phone, you are under surveillance. I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damn business.

Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now [with Barack Obama].

The [Edward] Snowden disclosures created this perception that people's privacy was being put at significant risk.