Theresa May Quotes

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.

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

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.

Scott's Eastwood movie Snowden sounds fascinating. I want to see it because it's about deserting your country ... for whatever reasons you have. Edward Snowden became famous for the wrong reasons, as Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger became famous for doing something spectacular.

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.

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

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 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 wasn't terribly familiar. I had read some of the headlines but didn't quite understand difference between WikiLeaks...[Edward] Snowden. And then watching the documentary, working on the film, you got to see his personal journey through this and sort of understand more about what he went through.

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.

Edward Snowden may not be a Chinese mole, but he might as well be. He's just handed Beijing a major score, while the NSA struggles to pick up the pieces - and the rest of us pay the price in terms of future national security.

No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat. The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

We would not have a national discussion without the actions of Edward Snowden. Democracy is at work because of Edward Snowden.

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

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.

What we do with the information now is up to us, but certainly I have a lot of respect for the courage and integrity that was required for [Edard Snowden] to take that action.

It is important to note that Edward Snowden was labeled as a spy not a whistle-blower - even though he exposed the reach of the spy services into the lives of most Americans. More importantly, he was denounced as being part of a generation that unfortunately combined being educated with a distrust of authority.

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.

People always ask me what I think, if Edward Snoden is a hero, if he's a villain. I don't really tend to moralize it so much as I feel like he's a whistleblower. He's someone who saw a wrongdoing and in order to shine a light on that wrongdoing had to bend some rules and break some laws along the way.

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

While we were shooting the movie, we shot in the actual hotel in Hong Kong where it all went down, the Mira Hotel. Laura Poitras was coming to Hong Kong to do a screening of Citizenfour, and she ended up staying at the Mira Hotel. It was her first time back in Hong Kong, and I ran into her in the elevator. Literally I had just finished shooting one day, and I came back to the hotel and she was in the elevator.

Snowden has enough [sic] information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had. The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.

Even the former Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder has come out to say that he believed that [Edward] Snowden performed a public service, and I couldn't agree more.

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.