Edward Snowden Quotes

Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft—they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud and even if you just send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. They give NSA direct access that they don’t oversee so that they can’t be held libel for it.

If the FBI gets the 'back doors' it wants, Internet services would be required to create a massive online infrastructure for law enforcement to spy on members of the public.

For many, the recent disclosure of massive warrantless surveillance programs of all citizens by the Obama administration has brought back memories of George Orwell's '1984.' Another Orwell book seems more apt as the White House and its allies try to contain the scandal: 'Animal Farm.'

To know we are being spied on by our own government, and to have someone else's government collaborating on that, to know that data storage is so cheap your information can be kept for years and used to create any kind of story, to me that's a grave attack on human rights.

There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

I think we're probably only about halfway through the number of revelations. I'm pretty certain there will be quite detailed stuff on other uses of covert surveillance. I suspect that emails will be the next scandal. And devices that track people moving around. That's just starting to come out.

The National Security Agency vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from or within the United States.

In this the age of concern over privacy invasion and surveillance and manipulation, people will start to realize that there is no way to avoid being manipulated by other people, governments, marketers, and the like.

My well-discussed 'paranoia' urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice.

The NSA is already bugging everything that everybody does. Each time there's a new revelation from Snowden, you realise the extent of it.

Today in Germany, everyone is being watched--even the watchers.

Corporate and government surveillance aren't separate; they're an alliance of interests.

Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.

What we have now in America is a surveillance society.

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons.

… the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information.

Surveillance is just getting too easy right now. And this is only because of technology..

Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like.

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.

Once you put in backdoors, once you allow a government to intercept anything they want, you have to give it to other governments around the world. Once you do that, there is no privacy; there is no security. There is no protection for democracy.

No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused.

The whole Big Brother vision of the world is looming large.

There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens' every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.