Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowdenis an American computer professional, former Central Intelligence Agencyemployee, and former contractor for the United States government who copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agencyin 2013 without prior authorization. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionOther
Date of Birth21 June 1983
CityElizabeth City, NC
CountryUnited States of America
In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.
Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries.
We don't have to ask for our privacy, we can take it back
I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded,
When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.
You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.
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.
It's really hard to take that step-not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I'm willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.
The internet is the most complex system that humans have ever invented. And with every internet enabled operation that we've seen so far, all of these offensive operations, we see knock on effects. We see unintended consequences.
There are programs such as the NSA paying RSA $10 million to use an insecure encryption standard by default in their products. That's making us more vulnerable not just to the snooping of our domestic agencies, but also foreign agencies.
What is right is not always the same as what is legal
I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.
The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.