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You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.

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
World
Agency
Intelligence
Accept
Accepting
Risk
Powerful
Come
Time
Agencies

More quotes by Edward Snowden

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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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Where are we going to reject that easy but flawed process of letting the intelligence services do whatever they want? It's inevitable that it will happen. I think it's going to be where Internet businesses go.
Edward Snowden
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The most important thing to the United States is not being able to attack our adversaries, the most important thing is to be able to defend ourselves. And we can't do that as long as we're subverting our own security standards for the sake of surveillance.
Edward Snowden
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The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns to the people most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people themselves authorized.
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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These activities can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, and used to harm you as an individual even without the government having any intent to do you wrong.
Edward Snowden
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I'm not a communist, a socialist or a radical. But these issues have to be addressed.
Edward Snowden
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Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.
Edward Snowden
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Something we have to remember is that everything about the internet is interconnected. All of our systems are not just common to us because of the network links between them, but because of the software packages, because of the hardware devices that comprise it. The same router that's deployed in the United States is deployed in China.
Edward Snowden
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The only way I could be extradited is through the principle of what my lawyers call politics trumps law.
Edward Snowden
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America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.
Edward Snowden
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One of the reasons that I came forward and sort burned of my life to the ground, and I can't go back and see my family in the United States - I obviously lost my job, which I was quite comfortable with. I lost my home. It was because I felt there was no alternative.
Edward Snowden
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For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. 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
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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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How do we preserve our civil rights, our traditions as a liberal democracy, in a time when government power is expanding and is more and more difficult to check?
Edward Snowden
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The true measurement of a person's worth isn't what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs. If you're not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real.
Edward Snowden
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The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security. Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security, just so they have a better chance of keeping an eye on us.
Edward Snowden
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US administration does not want me to return. People forget how I ended up in Russia. They waited until I departed Hong Kong to cancel my passport in order to trap me in Russia, because it's the most effective attack they have against me, given the political climate in the United States.
Edward Snowden
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There are times throughout history and it doesn't take long for either an American or a German, to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the Government to do things which were not right.
Edward Snowden
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I'm ultimately satisfied that we know a little bit more about how the world really works.
Edward Snowden