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They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.

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
Night
Aggressively
Authorities
Keeps
Authority
Anyone
Known

More quotes by Edward Snowden

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I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.
Edward Snowden
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If a single Russian source would come forward, he would be in hot water. And in the United States, what I did appearing at that [Vladimir] Putin press conference was not worth the price.
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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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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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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The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative.
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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And that's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build and it's not something I'm willing to live under.
Edward Snowden
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I was living a charmed life.
Edward Snowden
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The courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen - in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case - that they have become markedly more skeptical.
Edward Snowden
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One journalist said that everybody in Russia is miserable. Russia is a terrible place. And I'm going to end up miserable and I'm going to be a drunk and I'm never going to do anything. I don't drink. I've never been drunk in my life. And they talk about Russia like it's the worst place on earth. Russia's great.
Edward Snowden
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The public don't want to authorize the internet to become a battleground. We need to do everything we can as a society to keep that a neutral zone, to keep that an economic zone that can reflect our values, both politically, socially, and economically.
Edward Snowden
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We've learned that we've allowed technological capabilities to dictate policies and practices, rather than ensuring that our laws and values guide our technological capabilities.
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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We have to call mass surveillance mass surveillance. We can't let governments around the world redefine, and sort of weasel their way out of it by saying this is bulk collection.
Edward Snowden
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It's interesting that you mention [Andrei] Sakharov's creative axis - he had produced something for the government that he then realized was something other than he intended. That's something [NSA whistleblower] Bill Binney and I share.
Edward Snowden
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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.
Edward Snowden
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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.
Edward Snowden
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All I was was a mechanism.
Edward Snowden
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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