Edward Snowden Quotes

Clearly we must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack, but we can and must do so in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society. We can do that without living in an Orwellian world where the government and private corporations know every telephone call that we make, every website we visit, everyplace we go.

The intelligence community, in particular the FBI, have been sounding alarms about this for more than a year. So to argue that suddenly we have to do this because of the San Bernardino case doesn't really pass the straight-face test. I mean, they've been talking about this. And to say, well, it will only apply to this case, that just - that doesn't wash. This is a major piece of public policy.

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.

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

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

I think the vast majority of the American people say you shouldn't be able to collect my phone records if I'm not suspicious, if you don't have probable cause.

The government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from cyber-snooping, but we're not.

I think that the government has an obligation to monitor communications that could reveal a plot to murder millions of Americans. Monitoring bowel movements? I'll leave that to some of the gay bloggers, that's much more their style.

Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy.

We should be adult enough to understand that major countries are going to be spying on us.

The issue of wiretapping raises the issue of the balance between human liberty and the requirements of national security. I would say that the weight should be on the side of human liberty and that if human liberty is ever to be infringed, the demonstration on the national security side must be overwhelming.

This country, for reasons of history, culture and therefore law, has had an allergy to domestic intelligence.

The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security.

Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.

The question is not whether granting the government [this] authority makes us incrementally safer, but whether the additional safety is worth the sacrifice in terms of individual privacy, personal liberty and public trust.

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

Those who are troubled by our existing programs are not interested in repeating the tragedy of 9-11. And those who defend these programs are not dismissive of civil liberties. The challenge is getting the details right and that is not simple.

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.

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

I think most people accept that it is necessary to have some surveillance in a democratic society. I think most people accept that it's important to have limits and clear safeguards on that.

The revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing data on countless law-abiding American citizens has aroused great concern about the potential threat such an effort poses to liberty.

A: Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States. But that's not his goal. [His] objective is to expose software that people around the world use without knowing what they are exposing themselves without consciously agreeing to surrender their rights to privacy. [He] has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public.

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.

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.

Let's say tomorrow that there was a president, that we elected a president that eliminated the bulk collection of data. Let's just say it happened. What do you think would happen? People are like 'the sky would fall. We would be overrun with jihadists.' Maybe we could rely on the Constitution. Maybe we could get warrants. ... If you make the warrant specific, there's no limit to what you can get through a warrant.