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Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.

Edward Snowden

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Edward Snowden
Age: 41
Born: 1983
Born: June 21
Computer Scientist
Dissident
Intelligence Analyst
Intelligence Officer
Security Guard
System Administrator
Whistleblower
Elizabeth City
North Carolina
Edward Joseph Snowden
Ed Snowden
Talking
Understands
Whether
Privacy
Everyone
Gotten
Power
Decide
States
Everywhere
Things
Sacrifice
Willing
State
Surveillance

More quotes by Edward Snowden

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We are all today being monitored in advance and in criminal suspicion. And I think that's terrifying, and deeply illiberal as concept. And that's something that we should reject.
Edward Snowden
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Americans hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.
Edward Snowden
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I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.
Edward Snowden
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A zero-day exploit is a method of hacking a system. It's sort of a vulnerability that has an exploit written for it, sort of a key and a lock that go together to a given software package. It could be an internet web server. It could be Microsoft Office. It could be Adobe Reader or it could be Facebook.
Edward Snowden
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I don't spend all day running hand-on-hat from shadowy figures - I'm in exile.
Edward Snowden
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I read these polls because civil-liberties organizations tell me I need to be aware of public opinion.
Edward Snowden
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The only way I could be extradited is through the principle of what my lawyers call politics trumps law.
Edward Snowden
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The [George W.] Bush administration marked a very serious and profoundly negative turning point - not just for the nation, but for the international order, because we started to govern on the idea of might makes right. And that's a very old, toxic and infectious idea.
Edward Snowden
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There's not much value to us attacking Chinese systems. We might take a few computers offline. We might take a factory offline. We might steal secrets from a university research programs, and even something high-tech. But how much more does the United States spend on research and development than China does?
Edward Snowden
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People have to be free to investigate computer security. People have to be free to look for the vulnerabilities and create proof of concept code to show that they are true vulnerabilities in order for us to secure our systems.
Edward Snowden
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I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is.
Edward Snowden
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I would rather be without a state than without a voice.
Edward Snowden
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We have to be able to reject disproportionate and unjustified responses in the cyber domain just as we do in the physical domain.
Edward Snowden
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I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.
Edward Snowden
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There are unquestionable violations of our Constitution.
Edward Snowden
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The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
Edward Snowden
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In the end, the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.
Edward Snowden
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The new iPhone encryption does not stop them from accessing copies of your pictures or whatever that are uploaded to, for example, Apple's cloud service, which are still legally accessible because those are not encrypted. It only protects what's physically on the phone.
Edward Snowden
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I think the public still isn't aware of the frequency with which the cyber-attacks, as they're being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world, not just the US.
Edward Snowden
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There was a real choice when [Barack Obama] became president. It was a very difficult choice - to say, We're not going to hold senior officials to account with the same laws that every other citizen in the country is held to, or This is a nation that believes in the rule of law.
Edward Snowden