Quote

All I was was a mechanism.

Edward Snowden

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Mechanism

More quotes by Edward Snowden

Image
I'm not a spy, which is the real question
Edward Snowden
Image
The charges [government] brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense.
Edward Snowden
Image
Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.
Edward Snowden
Image
Internet exchanges and internet service providers - international fiber optic landing points - these are the key tools that governments go after in order to enable their programs of mass surveillance. If they want to be able to watch the entire population of a country instead of a single individual, you have to go after those bulk interchanges.
Edward Snowden
Image
You would be surprised how effective, at least for influencing low-information voters, negative propaganda about me is.
Edward Snowden
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's critical how we want to use these spy programs, these electronic capabilities, where we want to draw the line, and who should approve these programs, these decisions, and at what level, for engaging in operations that could lead us as a nation into a war.
Edward Snowden
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The Iraq war that I signed up for was launched on false premises. The American people were misled. Now, whether that was due to bad faith or simply mistakes in intelligence, I can't say for sure. But I can say it shows the problem of putting too much faith in intelligence systems without debating them in public.
Edward Snowden
Image
I talk to cryptographers, some of the leading technologists in the world, all the time about how we can deal with these issues. It is not possible to create a back door that is only accessible, for example, to the FBI.
Edward Snowden
Image
I'm still working for the government.
Edward Snowden
Image
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.
Edward Snowden
Image
Until we reform our laws and until we fix the excesses of these old policies that we inherited in the post-9/11 era, we're not going to be able to put the security back in the NSA.
Edward Snowden
Image
I don't want to hide. If I get arrested, I get arrested.
Edward Snowden
Image
So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading.
Edward Snowden
Image
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
Image
What is right is not always the same as what is legal
Edward Snowden
Image
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.
Edward Snowden