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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.

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
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Necessary
Provided
Couldn
Inherent
Rights
Governments
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Portion

More quotes by Edward Snowden

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Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.
Edward Snowden
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I don't want to directly confront great powers, which we cannot defeat on their terms. They have more money, more clout, more airtime. We cannot be effective without a mass movement, and the American people today are too comfortable to adapt to a mass movement.
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I'm still working for the government.
Edward Snowden
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If we can't have an open and honest debate about the value of ideas in a university in Glasgow, or Boston, or anywhere else in the world, then where are they going to go?
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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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Extremists are not going to disappear.
Edward Snowden
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When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.
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.
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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.
Edward Snowden
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One of the kind of unexpectedly liberating things of becoming this global fugitive is the fact that you don't worry so much about tomorrow. You think more about today. And unexpectedly, I like that very much.
Edward Snowden
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All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. That is a milestone we left a long time ago.
Edward Snowden
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We've got crazy little sites going up against established media behemoths.
Edward Snowden
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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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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.
Edward Snowden
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Too often we forget that social and political movements don't happen overnight. They don't bring change immediately - you have to build a critical mass of understanding of the issues.
Edward Snowden
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It also comes down to parenting. It is important to know what your beliefs are, and that you have to stand up for them or you don't really believe in them. You know, my father and mother - in fact, every member of my immediate family - have worked for the federal government. Sometimes misunderstood is that I didn't stand up to overthrow the system.
Edward Snowden
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There are unquestionable violations of our Constitution.
Edward Snowden
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Citizens have to fight suppression of information on matters of vital public importance. To tell the truth is not a crime.
Edward Snowden
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We have the right of revolution. Revolution does not always have to be weapons and warfare it's also about revolutionary ideas.
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That's the key - to maintain the garden of liberty, right? This is a generational thing that we must all do continuously. We only have the rights that we protect. It doesn't matter what we say or think we have. It's not enough to believe in something it matters what we actually defend.
Edward Snowden