Edward Snowden Quotes

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

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

It's inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

The safety and security of the nation depends more so than ever before on intelligence.

Intelligence gathered by this government leaves no doubt

Our agency (the Central Intelligence Agency) is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U. S. Government.

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

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

A threat to national security which has to be silenced

Abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.

There are more foreign intelligence officers inside the US now, working against US interests, than there were at the height of the cold war.

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.

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

The security [of European national is dependent on the effective intelligence of their neighbors.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

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

In the case of someone sharing classified information with foreign intelligence, for example, the FBI could surreptitiously ensure that they are no longer able to obtain sensitive information.

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.