Edward Snowden Quotes

If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government's been hiding.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

Perhaps it is time to be more careful what we ask government to do, and where we allow it to become part of our lives.

When we think in the context of the last decade's infringements upon personal liberty and the last year's revelations, it's not about surveillance. It's about liberty.

I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test.

As a rule, governments monitor people.

The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security.

If we take away all our privacy rights, we become our own terrorists.

No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused.

I don't have a problem with stepped-up surveillance as long as we follow the rule of law.

What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model?

stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.

Look at it this way: this administration is taking unprecedented steps to make sure that the government's secrets remain private while simultaneously invading the privacy of its citizens... Many innocents must be violated so that a few guilty people can be stopped. It's a digital stop-and-frisk.

Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.

When people say, "I have nothing to hide," what they're saying is, "My rights don't matter."

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.

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

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.

I don't want my marriage or my guns registered in Washington.

If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.

The TSA tears through your bags at the airport and the NSA watches what books you buy and what you say over the telephone and online. It doesn't feel like anything is private anymore.

What we're really debating is not security versus liberty, it's security versus surveillance. When we talk about electronic interception, the way that surveillance works is it preys on the weakness of protections that are being applied to all of our communications. The manner in which they're protected.

The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

In an age when many of our citizens casually reveal information about themselves in social media wildly beyond anything imaginable only a decade ago, it would seem to be a useful exercise in civics to re-educate the public about the value and purpose of protecting against unwarranted government intrusion.