Henry Giroux Quotes

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.

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

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.

It didn't really change my opinion about [Edward] Snowden all that much, but I definitely feel like as a culture, it gave us information that generated a responsibility to protect ourselves as much as we can and also a responsibility to hold our government accountable to honoring our constitutional rights.

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.

The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing. We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk. They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.

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.

Bringing an end to mass government surveillance needs to be a central pillar of returning to the principles we have put in jeopardy in the early 21st century.

The Snowden leaks did cause damage.

I mean, Ed Snowden was basically saying the same things that Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and other U.S. whistleblowers had said before him. But he came out more publicly, and maybe revealed more. He showed that when the U.S. government said, 'We are not surveilling U.S. citizens,' that was a lie.

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.

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.

I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.

When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.

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

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.

The subject of Citizenfour, Edward Snowden, could not be here for some treason.

We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time.

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.

My understanding is that espionage means giving secret or classified information to the enemy. Since Snowden shared information with the American people, his indictment for espionage could reveal (or confirm) that the US Government views you and me as the enemy.

In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government,[Barack] Obama has reneged on his promises.

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 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.

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.