Edward Snowden Quotes

American whistleblower who exposed extensive government surveillance programs. Snowden's actions sparked worldwide debates on privacy and civil liberties in the digital age. His disclosures have had a lasting impact on the fields of cybersecurity and online privacy.

I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.

Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating. But there's a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I'm no longer alone.

I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

It may be that by watching everywhere we go, by watching everything we do, by analyzing every word we say, by waiting and passing judgment over every association we make and every person we love, that we could uncover a terrorist plot, or we could discover more criminals. But is that the kind of society we want to live in?

Perhaps I am naive, but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.

I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal.

All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

They still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they're coming from, and they have no idea where they're going. And if that's the case, how can we, as the public, trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?

I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, 'Hey, this is not appropriate.'

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.

For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.

We're losing our way as a society. If we don't stand up, if we don't say what we think those rights should be, and if we don't protect them, we will very soon find out that we do not have them.

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.

Being a patriot doesn't mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries.

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.

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

No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us.

I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

The United States Government has placed me on no-f... -Edward Snowden

The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists.

What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?

If I could go anywhere in the world, that place wo... -Edward Snowden

If I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home.

Discovering the context

This quote suggests that, given the choice, the speaker's preferred destination would be their own home. It emphasizes the emotional and psychological value the speaker places on their sense of home, highlighting the comfort and security it provides, even in comparison to exciting or exotic locations elsewhere in the world.

Edward Snowden Quotes

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