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We are no longer citizens, we no longer have leaders. We're subjects, and we have rulers.

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
Citizens
Longer
Leader
Rulers
Leaders
Subjects

More quotes by Edward Snowden

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Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.
Edward Snowden
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The FBI was creating a world where citizens rely on Apple to defend their rights, rather than the other way around.
Edward Snowden
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Are our competitors - for example, China, which is a deeply authoritarian nation - becoming more authoritarian or more liberal over time?
Edward Snowden
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It's fascinating to see how things have changed. Basically, every time the US government gets off the soapbox of the Sunday-morning talk shows, the average American's support for the surveillance revelations grows.
Edward Snowden
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I describe myself as an indoor cat, because I'm a computer guy and I always have been.
Edward Snowden
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When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is okay. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.
Edward Snowden
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We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.
Edward Snowden
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The government doesn't want us to know what they're doing, how they're interpreting the law, how they're interpreting and redefining their powers, and increasingly, how they're redefining the boundaries of our rights and our liberties, broadly, socially, and categorically without our involvement.
Edward Snowden
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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.
Edward Snowden
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I love my country. I love my family. And I have dedicated my life to both of them.
Edward Snowden
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You don't need to justify your rights as a citizen - that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, I don't need them in this context or I can't understand this, they are no longer rights.
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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Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.
Edward Snowden
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I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.
Edward Snowden
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The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.
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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Technology provides us means outside of governments to begin enforcing our rights, enforcing protection of civil liberties, regardless of law, through the implementation of systems and standards.
Edward Snowden
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When you use any kind of internet based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war.
Edward Snowden
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We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.
Edward Snowden
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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.
Edward Snowden