Edward Snowden Quotes

Americans hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

States will also have trouble acting anonymously in cyberspace, as private companies are increasingly willing and able to identify the sources of cyberattacks. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant made headlines in 2013 when it exposed a covert Chinese military cyberunit responsible for stealing massive amounts of data from U.S. government and corporate networks. In February 2015, the Russian security software firm Kaspersky Lab claimed to have identified spyware from an unnamed Western government on computers in 30 countries. And in January 2016, the cyber-intelligence firm iSIGHT Partners determined that a Russian group was probably behind a successful attack on the Ukrainian power grid.

As our use of technologies grows exponentially, so do our country's vulnerabilities. Our national security depends on the stability and reliability of our communications infrastructure. The cyber threat to IT and national security systems has never been greater.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.

It shouldn't surprise any American to know that Russia uses its money and its intelligence services to spread disinformation, use subterfuge and deception and manipulation, to try to divide political opinion within the United States, within any Western European country, or among NATO countries. That's one of the techniques that Russia has used for decades, during the Cold War and during the Putin era.

This is an ongoing threat from a variety of sources around the world. And actually I think it works both ways. I'm not privy to it, but I think all of the various country that have the ability are invading each other's computers all the time. But we have to protect our data. It's very important.

The reality of today from a cyber security point of view - I think some of the top people predict that the next big war is fought on cyber security.

Any country on the face of the Earth with an active intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

There are two kinds of people in America today: those who have experienced a foreign cyber attack and know it, and those who have experienced a foreign cyber attack and don't know it.

For some reason, it seems that the government considers hackers who are out to line their pockets less of a threat than those who are trying to make a political point.

When Russia's intelligence agencies obtained some of the National Security Agency's secrets about its own cyberweapons, it appeared to do so by manipulating a virus protection program sold by Kaspersky, a Russian firm.

The Kremlin hacked our presidential election, is waging a cyberwar against our NATO allies, and is probing opportunities to use similar tactics against democracies worldwide. Why, then, are federal agencies, local and state governments, and millions of Americans unwittingly inviting this threat into their cyber networks and secure spaces?

Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.

Organized crime and rogue nation states and terrorists are very much focused on the Internet of things. The challenge that goes with connectivity is always security. The bad guys go wherever the return is, and now it's more lucrative for bad guys to focus on cybercrime than traditional crime.

The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them.

In a modern digitalized world, it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its SCADA systems to a halt. To impoverish a country, one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant. In cyberspace, no country is an island.

What we've seen over the last decade is we've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.

All of our intelligence agencies, our Department of Defense, are all working to meet this threat. But it's a fast moving world; it's a place where offense is easier than defense, and keeping up with the next innovation in cyber-warfare is an enormous challenge.

I worked for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters, and is the equivalent of the NSA here in the U.S.

My view is that the cyber threat is bigger than any one government agency - or even the government itself. But the FBI brings a rare combination of scope and scale, experience, and tools to the mix. We investigate criminal activity like intrusions and cyber attacks, but we also investigate national security threats like foreign influence.

With Fancy Bear, we have medium-level confidence it's GRU, which is Russia's military intelligence agency, and with Cozy Bear, we have low-level confidence it's FSB, the Russian federal security service.

Bad actors like Russia, Iran, and China have demonstrated time and time again they have both the capabilities and the intent to use the cyber domain as an operating space to wreak havoc.

At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the U.S. to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the U.S. The NSA lies about what it stores.

In cyberspace, it is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold security for one's own country by sacrificing that of others.

I am a physical retailer by trade - if your shop is burgled you don't immediately think, 'Is it North Korea? Is it the Mafia?' But with cyber you don't know initially whether you're dealing with a state actor, as they call them, a small-time criminal, an insider.