Edward Snowden Quotes

The TSA tears through your bags at the airport and the NSA watches what books you buy and what you say over the telephone and online. It doesn't feel like anything is private anymore.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy.

In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.

Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet.

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

As long as government is allowed to collect all Internet data, the perceived exigency will drive honest civil servants to reach more broadly and deeply into our networked lives.

You already have zero privacy - get over it.

If we give up all our privacy rights, have we become any safer?

It's interesting - what are you willing to give up in terms of your privacy for access to other people? For access to things you think you desperately need. Ultimately, it's that old saying, isn't it? If the service is free, then the product is you. The thing being sold is you. There's a product for sale in you and your data.

To be sure, anonymity online has it uses and is very important. Governments hoover up people's telephone and e-mail records without oversight, and companies track astonishingly granular personal information.

What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model?

I'm glad the government has shut down. Think about it, for the first time in years it's safe to talk on the phone and send emails without anybody listening in.

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 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.

Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions. Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.

Our need for public safety and our need for privacy are crashing into each other and we've got to sort that out.

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

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.

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

I believe strongly that we can protect our people without undermining our constitutional rights and I worry very, very much about the huge attacks on privacy that we have seen in recent years - both from the government and the private sector. I worry that we are moving toward an Orwellian society, and this is something I will oppose as vigorously as I can.

We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can't have the national surveillance agency.

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.

Paradoxically, in its quest to make Americans more secure, the NSA has made American communications less secure; it has undermined the safety of the entire internet.

I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.