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I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.

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
Target
Mass
Works
Used
People
Surveillance

More quotes by Edward Snowden

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I have had no contact with the Chinese government ... I only work with journalists.
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What we're seeing now, or starting to see, is an atomization of the Internet community. Before, everybody went only to a few sites now we've got all these boutiques.
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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.
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The internet exchange is sort of the core points where all of the international cables come together, where all of the internet service providers come together, and they trade lines with each other. These are priority one targets for any sort of espionage agency, because they provide access to so many people's communications.
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I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.
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[Brazil] went to the UN and said, We need new standards for this. We need to take a look at what they're calling data sovereignty.
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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I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watching what's happening, and goes, 'This is something that's not our place to decide.' The public needs to decide whether these programs or policies are right or wrong.
Edward Snowden
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I was living a charmed life.
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My whole model, from the beginning, was not to personally publish a single document. I provided these documents to journalists because I didn't want my biases to decide what's in the public interest and what is not.
Edward Snowden
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Your rights matter, because you never know when you're going to need them.
Edward Snowden
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The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative.
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What is right is not always the same as what is legal
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.
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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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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You would be surprised how effective, at least for influencing low-information voters, negative propaganda about me is.
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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The charges [government] brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense.
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