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I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.

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
Think
Population
Thinking
Threat
Entire
Mass
Anyone
Justifies
Point
Placing
Today
Surveillance
Anything
Justify

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The authoritarian one believed that an individual's rights were basically provided by governments and were determined by states. The other society - ours - tended to believe that a large portion of our rights were inherent and couldn't be abrogated by governments, even if this seemed necessary.
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I told the government I'd volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose.
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The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative.
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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?
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Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage.
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We have these traditional political parties that are less and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people, so people are in search of their own values.
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I wasn't trying to change the laws or slow down the machine. Maybe I should have. My critics say that I was not revolutionary enough. But they forget that I am a product of the system. I worked those desks, I know those people and I still have some faith in them, that the services can be reformed.
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I have had no contact with the Chinese government ... I only work with journalists.
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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.
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If I and other whistleblowers are sentenced to long years in prison without so much as a chance to explain our motivations to a jury, it will have a deeply chilling effect on future whistleblowers working as I did to expose government abuse and overreach. It will chill speech. It will corrode the quality of our democracy.
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I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.
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After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power - the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government - for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism.
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The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.
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Radicals are not going to disappear. They're going to go underground. They're going to be hardened. And they're not going to be exposed to contrary ideas made by educated people who can make real, convincing, and persuasive arguments to deradicalise these people.
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It's much more important for U.S. to be able to defend against foreign attacks than it is to be able to launch successful attacks against foreign adversaries.
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We have to confront the reality of our world, and make the hard decisions about which way we want to move forward.
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There were no whistleblower protections that would've protected me - and that's known to everybody in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.
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I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.
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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.
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Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.
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