Edward Snowden Quotes

At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the U.S. to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the U.S. The NSA lies about what it stores.

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.

Every single means of communication amongst the public, the government has antennae into, to find out who is liable to be sympathetic and who is not liable to be sympathetic, and I think this has probably been going on since all channels of communication began.

You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people's Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.

The NSA is already bugging everything that everybody does. Each time there's a new revelation from Snowden, you realise the extent of it.

The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet.[Barack] Obama has done nothing about that.

What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA's own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.

Bulk collection means all of your communications are being secretly intercepted. They are being stolen as they cross India, and they're being stored in these silos so that they can be rifled through at the convenience of secret agents, basically.

Let me make this very clear: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, our digital exhaust is being sucked up by the government. It is being compiled on big server farms and it's being analyzed by different computer programs, looking for any hint that you and I are up to no good.

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

What we revealed is that this spying system is devoted not to terrorists, but is directed to innocent people around the world. None of this has anything to do with terrorism. Is Angela Merkel a terrorist?

The key question: will the NSA continue to monitor hundreds of millions of people without any suspicion? Under Obama's proposals: Yes.

Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people.

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.

Corporate and government surveillance aren't separate; they're an alliance of interests.

Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.

Eric Holder, our attorney general, says the Mr. Snowden will be brought to justice. Just as soon as we can find someone who can track his calls and read his emails.

I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.

What the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation. They want to have a perfect record of the last five years of your life, so when you come to their attention, they can know everything about you. I'm not down with that, but [Bill] Binney was trying to create something like that.

U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.

The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.

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

Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it - whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

Governmental surveillance is not about the government collecting the information you're sharing publicly and willingly; it's about collecting the information you don't think you're sharing at all, such as the online searches you do on search engines... or private emails or text messages... or the location of your mobile phone at any time.