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It's Clear The Cia Was Trying To Play 'keep Away' With Documents Relevant To An Investigation By Their Overseers In Congress, And That's A Serious Constitutional Concern. But It's Equally If Not More Concerning That We're Seeing Another 'merkel Effect,' Where An Elected Official Does Not Care At All That The Rights Of Millions Of Ordinary Citizens Are Violated By Our Spies, But Suddenly It's A Scandal When A Politician Finds Out The Same Thing Happens To Them.

-Edward Snowden

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It's Clear The Cia

Edward Snowden

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It's Clear The Cia Was Trying To Play 'keep Away' With Documents Relevant To An Investigation By Their Overseers In Congress, And That's A Serious Constitutional Concern. But It's Equally If Not More Concerning That We're Seeing Another 'merkel Effect,' Where An Elected Official Does Not Care At All That The Rights Of Millions Of Ordinary Citizens Are Violated By Our Spies, But Suddenly It's A Scandal When A Politician Finds Out The Same Thing Happens To Them.

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If I Had To Guess What The Future's Going To Look Like For Me - Assuming It's Not An Orange Jumpsuit In A Hole - I Think I'm Going To Alternate Between Tech And Policy.

My Case Clearly Demonstrates The Need For Comprehensive Whistleblower Protection Act Reform. If We Had Had A Real Process In Place, And Reports Of Wrongdoing Could Be Taken To Real, Independent Arbiters Rather Than Captured Officials, I Might Not Have Had To Sacrifice So Much To Do What At This Point Even The President Seems To Agree Needed To Be Done.

[bill] Binney Designed Thinthread, An Nsa Program That Used Encryption To Try To Make Mass Surveillance Less Objectionable. It Would Still Have Been Unlawful And Unconstitutional.

I'm Ultimately Satisfied That We Know A Little Bit More About How The World Really Works.

The Surveillance Revelations Are Critically Important Because They Revealed That Our Rights Are Being Redefined In Secret, By Secret Courts That Were Never Intended To Have That Role - Without The Consent Of The Public, Without Even The Awareness Of The Majority Of Our Political Representatives.

A Lot Of People In 2008 Voted For Obama. I Did Not Vote For Him. I Voted For A Third Party. But I Believed In Obama's Promises.

Microsoft Is In A Court Battle With The Department Of Justice. The Doj Is Saying, "we Want Information From Your Data Center In Ireland. It's Not About A Us Citizen, But We Want It." Microsoft Said, "ok, Fine. Go To A Judge In Ireland. Ask Them For A Warrant. We Have A Mutual Legal-assistance Treaty. They'll Do It. Give That To Us, And We'll Provide The Information To You In Accordance With Irish Laws."

The Power Of The Presidency Is Important, But It Is Not Determinative.

I Have A Somewhat Sneaky Way Of Effecting Political Change.

Political Change

Every Time You Pick Up The Phone, Dial A Number, Write An E-mail, Make A Purchase, Travel On The Bus Carrying A Cell Phone, Swipe A Card Somewhere, You Leave A Trace, And The Government Has Decided That It's Good Idea To Collect It All, Everything, Even If You've Never Been Suspected Of Doing A Crime.

What Has A Great Value To Us As A Nation Is The Internet Itself. The Internet Is Critical Infrastructure To The United States. We Use The Internet For Every Communication That Businesses Rely On Every Day.

Our Rights Are Not Granted By Governments. They Are Inherent To Our Nature. But It's Entirely The Opposite For Governments: Their Privileges Are Precisely Equal To Only Those Which We Suffer Them To Enjoy.

The Nsa Has Built An Infrastructure That Allows It To Intercept Almost Everything.

Government Spying

I Have Had No Contact With The Chinese Government ... I Only Work With Journalists.

Custom Developed Digital Weapons, Cyber Weapons Nowadays Typically Chain Together A Number Of Zero-day Exploits That Are Targeted Against The Specific Site, The Specific Target That They Want To Hit. But It Depends, This Level Of Sophistication, On The Budget And The Quality Of The Actor Who's Instigating The Attack. If It's A Country That's Less Poor Or Less Sophisticated, It'll Be A Less Sophisticated Attack.

People Have To Be Free To Investigate Computer Security. People Have To Be Free To Look For The Vulnerabilities And Create Proof Of Concept Code To Show That They Are True Vulnerabilities In Order For Us To Secure Our Systems.

In The United States, There Hasn't Been Much Legislative Change On The Surveillance Issue, Although There Are Some Tepid Proposals.

When It Comes To Cyber Warfare, We Have More To Lose Than Any Other Nation On Earth. The Technical Sector Is The Backbone Of The American Economy, And If We Start Engaging In These Kind Of Behaviors, In These Kind Of Attacks, We're Setting A Standard, We're Creating A New International Norm Of Behavior That Says This Is What Nations Do. This Is What Developed Nations Do.

One Of The Foremost Activities Of The Nsa's Fad, Or Foreign Affairs Division, Is To Pressure Or Incentivize Eu Member States To Change Their Laws To Enable Mass Surveillance.

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.

We Have The Means And We Have The Technology To End Mass Surveillance Without Any Legislative Action At All, Without Any Policy Changes.

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.

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.

Too Often We Forget That Social And Political Movements Don't Happen Overnight. They Don't Bring Change Immediately - You Have To Build A Critical Mass Of Understanding Of The Issues.

Using The Language Of Heroism, Calling Daniel Ellsberg A Hero, And Calling The Other People Who Made Great Sacrifices Heroes - Even Though What They Have Done Is Heroic - Is To Distinguish Them From The Civic Duty They Performed, And Excuses The Rest Of Us From The Same Civic Duty To Speak Out When We See Something Wrong, When We Witness Our Government Engaging In Serious Crimes, Abusing Power, Engaging In Massive Historic Violations Of The Constitution Of The United States. We Have To Speak Out Or We Are Party To That Bad Action.

I'm Not A Politician, And I Do Not Think I Am As Effective In This Way As People Who Actually Prepare For It - Is To Focus On Technical Reform, Because I Speak The Language Of Technology. I Spoke With Tim Berners-lee, The Guy Who Invented The World Wide Web. We Agree On The Necessity For This Generation To Create What He Calls The Magna Carta For The Internet. We Want To Say What "digital Rights" Should Be. What Values Should We Be Protecting, And How Do We Assert Them.

By Putting These Sort Of Lines Around What Ideas Are Proper Or Improper, We Lose Things.

Properly Implemented Strong Crypto Systems Are One Of The Few Things That You Can Rely On.

We Have To Be Able To Ask Questions In Order To Answer Them.

For People Who Aren't Familiar With My Background, I Didn't Graduate High School. My Career High Salary Was About $200,000. My Last Position Was About $122,000. For A Guy Without A High School Diploma, That's Pretty Good.

We Have Got A Cia Station Just Up The Road – The Consulate Here In Hong Kong – And I Am Sure They Are Going To Be Busy For The Next Week. And That Is A Concern I Will Live With For The Rest Of My Life, However Long That Happens To Be.

Government Spying

I Hate These Questions - I Don't Like Talking About This Stuff [popular Culture], Because It's So... To Me, It's So Ordinary.

It's Much More Important For U.s. To Be Able To Defend Against Foreign Attacks Than It Is To Be Able To Launch Successful Attacks Against Foreign Adversaries.

What Defines Patriotism, For Me, Is The Idea That One Rises To Act On Behalf Of One's Country.

I Don't Go Out And Play Football And Stuff - That's Not Me. I Want To Think, I Want To Build, I Want To Talk, I Want To Create.

We Don't Have A Great Clash Of Civilizations, A Clash Of Ideologies, A Clash Of Alternative Models, Where Governments Thought To Themselves, If We Go Too Far, If We Sort Of Trample Unreasonably On Rights, We'll Give Birth To A Political Movement Which Will Cost Us Our Credibility, And Will Possibly Cost Us Our Offices, Because People Will Vote For The Other Team, The Other Guys.

No One Would Argue That It's In The United States' Interest To Have Independent Knowledge Of The Plans And Intentions Of Foreign Countries. But We Need To Think About Where To Draw The Line On These Kind Of Operations So We're Not Always Attacking Our Allies, The People We Trust, The People We Need To Rely On, And To Have Them In Turn Rely On Us.

We Have To Decide Why Terrorism Is A New Threat. There Has Always Been Terrorism.

Defending Ourselves From Internet-based Attacks, Internet-originated Attacks, Is Much, Much More Important Than Our Ability To Launch Attacks Against Similar Targets In Foreign Countries.

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.

Getting Inequality Out There Into The Consciousness Was Important. All These Political Pundits Now Talking About The 2014 And 2016 Elections Are Talking About Inequality.

At The Trial Of Chelsea Manning, The Government Could Point To No Case Of Specific Damage That Had Been Caused By The Massive Revelation Of Classified Information. The Charges Are A Reaction To The Government's Embarrassment More Than Genuine Concern About These Activities, Or They Would Substantiate What Harms Were Done.

Genuine Concern

I Saw Things That Reached A Point That I Could No Longer Conscientiously Participate With Them. And I Simply Do What I Could To Allow The Public To Make A Better Decision About Whether Or Not These Things Should Continue.

The Us Government Still Has No Idea What Documents I Have Because Encryption Works

Under Observation, We Act Less Free, Which Means We Effectively Are Less Free.

[bill] Binney Will Argue With You All Day About Thinthread, But His Idea Was That It Would Collect Everything About Everybody But Be Immediately Encrypted So No One Could Read It. Only A Court Could Give Intelligence Officials The Key To Decrypt It. The Idea Was To Find A Kind Of A Compromise Between [privacy Rights And] The Assertion That If You Don't Collect Things As They Happen, You Won't Have Them Later - Because What The Nsa Really Wants Is The Capability Of Retrospective Investigation.

Truth Is Coming, And It Cannot Be Stopped.

I Have Been To The Darkest Corners Of Government, And What They Fear Is Light.

It's Clear The Cia Was Trying To Play 'keep Away' With Documents Relevant To An Investigation By Their Overseers In Congress, And That's A Serious Constitutional Concern. But It's Equally If Not More Concerning That We're Seeing Another 'merkel Effect,' Where An Elected Official Does Not Care At All That The Rights Of Millions Of Ordinary Citizens Are Violated By Our Spies, But Suddenly It's A Scandal When A Politician Finds Out The Same Thing Happens To Them.

What We're Seeing Now, Or Starting To See, Is An Atomization Of The Internet Community. Before, Everybody Went Only To A Few Sites; Now We've Got All These Boutiques.

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.

There Were No Whistleblower Protections That Would've Protected Me - And That's Known To Everybody In The Intelligence Community. There Are No Proper Channels For Making This Information Available When The System Fails Comprehensively.

Look At The Reactions Of Liberal Governments To The Surveillance Revelations During The Last Years. In The United States, We've Got This Big Debate, But We've Got Official Paralysis - Because They're The Ones Who Had Their Hand Caught Most Deeply In The Cookie Jar.

I Don't Want The Stage. I'm Terrified Of Giving These Talking Heads Some Distraction, Some Excuse To Jeopardize, Smear, And Delegitimize A Very Important Movement.

You Simply Have To Eventually Fall Under Suspicion From Somebody Even By A Wrong Call. And Then They Can Use This System To Go Back In Time And Scrutinize Every Decision You've Ever Made, Every Friend You've Ever Discussed Something With. And Attack You On That Basis To Sort To Derive Suspicion From An Innocent Life And Paint Anyone In The Context Of A Wrongdoer.

Government Spying

If The United States Is Promoting The Development Of Exploits, Of Vulnerabilities, Of Insecurity In This Critical Infrastructure, And We're Not Fixing It When We Find It, Instead We Put It On The Shelf So We Can Use It The Next Time We Want To Launch An Attack Against Some Foreign Country. We're Leaving Ourselves At Risk.

If The Obama Administration Responds With An Even Harsher Hand Against Me, They Can Be Assured That They'll Soon Find Themselves Facing An Equally Harsh Public Response.

I Acted On My Belief That The Nsa's Mass Surveillance Programs Would Not Withstand A Constitutional Challenge, And That The American Public Deserved A Chance To See These Issues Determined By Open Courts. Today, A Secret Program Authorized By A Secret Court Was, When Exposed To The Light Of Day, Found To Violate Americans' Rights. It Is The First Of Many.

I Must Say I'm Surprised By How Skeptical Of The [barack] Obama Administration The Nation Has Been.

When We Look At The Full-on Mass Surveillance Watching Everyone In The Country, In The United States, It Doesn't Work. It Didn't Stop The Attacks In Boston. The Marathon Bombings. Where Again, We Knew Who These Individuals Were. It Didn't Stop The Underwear Bomber, Whose Father Walked Into An Embassy And Warned Us About This Individual Before He Walked Onto An Airplane. And It's Not Going To Stop The Next Attacks Either. Because Again, They're Not Public Safety Programmes. They're Spying Programmes. They Are Valuable For Spying.

When I Was Working In Japan, I Created A System For Ensuring That Intelligence Data Was Globally Recoverable In The Event Of A Disaster. I Was Not Aware Of The Scope Of Mass Surveillance. I Came Across Some Legal Questions When I Was Creating It. My Superiors Pushed Back And Were Like, "well, How Are We Going To Deal With This Data?" And I Was Like, "i Didn't Even Know It Existed."

You Would Be Surprised How Effective, At Least For Influencing Low-information Voters, Negative Propaganda About Me Is.

We Have To Confront The Reality Of Our World, And Make The Hard Decisions About Which Way We Want To Move Forward.

We Have The Right Of Revolution. Revolution Does Not Always Have To Be Weapons And Warfare; It's Also About Revolutionary Ideas.

Everyone Everywhere Now Understands How Bad Things Have Gotten — And They’re Talking About It. They Have The Power To Decide For Themselves Whether They Are Willing To Sacrifice Their Privacy To The Surveillance State.

Surveillance State

I Have Had Many Opportunities To Flee Hk, But I Would Rather Stay And Fight The United States Government In The Courts, Because I Have Faith In Hong Kong's Rule Of Law.

The Chairs [in Congress] Are Part Of The "gang Of Eight." They Get Briefed On Every Covert-action Program And Everything Like That. They Know Where All The Bodies Are Buried. At The Same Time, They Get Far More Campaign Donations Than Anybody Else From Defense Contractors, From Intelligence Corporations, From Private Military Companies.

A Lot Of People In 2008 Voted For Obama. I Did Not Vote For Him. I Voted For A Third Party. But I Believed In Obama's Promises. He Continued With The Policies Of His Predecessor.

We Can Plant Bugs In Machines. Once You Go On The Network, I Can Identify Your Machine. You Will Never Be Safe Whatever Protections You Put In Place.

Extremists Are Not Going To Disappear.

Cyber Command Is Supposed To Be Defending Our Critical Infrastructure At Home, But They Are Spending So Much Time Looking At How To Attack Networks, How To Break Systems, And How To Turn Things Off. I Don't Think It Adds Up As Representing A Defensive Team.

Terrorism Kills Far Fewer People Than Cigarettes, Or Alcohol, Or Car Accidents. But We Don't See Ourselves Restructuring Society And Lives In Order To Make Those Threats Go Away.

I Took What I Knew To The Public, So What Affects All Of Us Can Be Discussed By All Of Us In The Light Of Day, And I Asked The World For Justice.

You Can't Come Up Against The World's Most Powerful Intelligence Agencies And Not Accept The Risk.

I Had Been Looking For Leaders, But I Realized That Leadership Is About Being The First To Act.

Government Spying

People Sometimes Say I Broke An Oath Of Secrecy - One Of The Early Charges Leveled Against Me. But It's A Fundamental Misunderstanding, Because There Is No Oath Of Secrecy For People Who Work In The Intelligence Community. You Are Asked To Sign A Civil Agreement, Called A Standard Form 312, Which Basically Says If You Disclose Classified Information, They Can Sue You; They Can Do This, That And The Other. And You Risk Going To Jail.

Us Spend More On Research And Development Than The Other Countries, So We Shouldn't Be Making The Internet A More Hostile, A More Aggressive Territory.

Research And Development

Someone Responding To The Story Said 'real Spies Do Not Speak Like That'. Well, I Am A Spy And That Is How They Talk. Whenever We Had A Debate In The Office On How To Handle Crimes, They Do Not Defend Due Process - They Defend Decisive Action. They Say It Is Better To Kick Someone Out Of A Plane Than Let These People Have A Day In Court. It Is An Authoritarian Mindset In General.

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.

Do We Want To Emulate China In The Way That China Emulates The West? I Think, For Most Americans, The Answer To That Question Would Be No.

When You're Attacking A Router On The Internet, And You're Doing It Remotely, It's Like Trying To Shoot The Moon With A Rifle. Everything Has To Happen Exactly Right. Every Single Variable Has To Be Controlled And Precisely Accounted For. And That's Not Possible To Do When You Have Limited Knowledge Of The Target You're Attacking.

I Was Living A Charmed Life.

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.

We Need The Security Standards To Apply To The Internet. We Need To Be Able To Trust That When We Send Our Emails Through Verizon, That Verizon Isn't Sharing With The Nsa, That Verizon Isn't Sharing Them With The Fbi Or German Intelligence Or French Intelligence Or Russian Intelligence Or Chinese Intelligence.

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.

I Can Do More Good Outside Of Prison... This Country Is Worth Dying For.

When I Talk About The Polling, I'm Talking About The Principles. It Shows These Officials Are Knowingly Attempting To Shift Public Opinion, Even Though They Know What They Say Is Not Factual.

The United States Has Faced Threats From Criminal Groups, From Terrorists, From Spies Throughout Our History, And We Have Limited Our Responses. We Haven't Resorted To Total War Every Time We Have A Conflict Around The World, Because That Restraint Is What Defines Us. That Restraint Is What Gives Us The Moral Standing To Lead The World.

People Do Not Like Being Lied To, And They Do Not Like Having Their Rights Violated. So As Soon As [officials] Stop Making Arguments, You See Support For Me Starts To Rise.

I Was Hoping To Catch [vladimir] Putin In A Lie - Like What Happened To Director Of National Intelligence James Clapper [in His Congressional Testimony]. So I Asked Putin Basically The Same Questions About Russian Mass Surveillance. I Knew He's Doing The Same Thing, But He Denied It.

We Need To Make Sure That Whenever We're Engaging In A Cyber-warfare Campaign, A Cyber-espionage Campaign In The United States, That We Understand The Word Cyber Is Used As A Euphemism For The Internet, Because The American Public Would Not Be Excited To Hear That We're Doing Internet Warfare Campaigns, Internet Espionage Campaigns, Because We Realize That We Ourselves Are Impacted By It.

If Congress Is Going To Investigate Baseball Players About Whether Or Not They Told The Truth, How Can We Justify Giving The Most Powerful Intelligence Official, [james] Clapper, A Pass? This Is How J. Edgar Hoover Ended Up In Charge Of The Fbi Forever.

The Nsa Routinely Lies In Response To Congressional Inquiries About The Scope Of Surveillance In America.

Individuals Have International Duties Which Transcend The National Obligations Of Obedience. Therefore Individual Citizens Have The Duty To Violate Domestic Laws To Prevent Crimes Against Peace And Humanity From Occurring.

The Majority Of Terrorist Attacks That Have Been Disrupted In The United States Have Been Disrupted Due To Things Like The Time Square Bomber, Who Was Caught By A Hotdog Vendor, Not A Mass Surveillance Program, Not A Cyber-espionage Campaign.

Richard Nixon Got Kicked Out Of Washington For Tapping One Hotel Suite. Today We're Tapping Every American Citizen In The Country, And No One Has Been Put On Trial For It Or Even Investigated. We Don't Even Have An Inquiry Into It.

I'm Not A Spy, Which Is The Real Question

It's Critical How We Want To Use These Spy Programs, These Electronic Capabilities, Where We Want To Draw The Line, And Who Should Approve These Programs, These Decisions, And At What Level, For Engaging In Operations That Could Lead Us As A Nation Into A War.

If It Comes To A Question Of Law, The Charges They Brought Against Me - The Espionage Act - Is Called The Quintessential Political Crime. A Political Crime, In Legal Terms, Is Defined As Any Crime Against A State, As Opposed To Against An Individual. Assassination, For Example, Is Not A Political Crime Because You've Killed A Person, An Individual, And They've Been Harmed; Their Family's Been Harmed. But The State Itself, You Can't Be Extradited For Harming It.

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’m Neither Traitor Nor Hero. I’m An American.

When It Comes To The Internet, When It Comes To The United States' Technical Economy, We Have More To Lose Than Any Other Nation On Earth.

I Don't Want To Live In A Society That Does These Sort Of Things.

If I Defected At All, I Defected From The Government To The Public

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.

Knowing Everything

Allowing The U.s. Government To Intimidate Its People With Threats Of Retaliation For Revealing Wrongdoing Is Contrary To The Public Interest.

We Hack Everyone Everywhere. We Like To Make A Distinction Between Us And The Others. But We Are In Almost Every Country In The World. We Are Not At War With These Countries.

There's A Real Danger In The Way Our Representative Government Functions Today. It Functions Properly Only When Paired With Accountability.

Nobody's Going To Vote For Isis.

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.

They Still Have Negligent Auditing, They Still Have Things Going For A Walk, And They Have No Idea Where They're Coming From And They Have No Idea Where They're Going. And If That's The Case, How Can We As The Public Trust The Nsa With All Of Our Information, With All Of Our Private Records, The Permanent Record Of Our Lives?

I Know The Media Likes To Personalize Political Debates, And I Know The Government Will Demonize Me.

Ultimately, If People Lose Their Willingness To Recognize That There Are Times In Our History When Legality Becomes Distinct From Morality, We Aren't Just Ceding Control Of Our Rights To The Government, But Our Futures.

Chelsea Manning Got Thirty-five Years In Prison, While I'm Still Free.

I Talk To People In The Aclu Office In New York All The Time. I'm Able To Participate In The Debate And To Campaign For Reform. I'm Just The First To Come Forward In The Manner That I Did And Succeed.

I Think The Public Still Isn't Aware Of The Frequency With Which The Cyber-attacks, As They're Being Called In The Press, Are Being Used By Governments Around The World, Not Just The Us.

If We Can't Have An Open And Honest Debate About The Value Of Ideas In A University In Glasgow, Or Boston, Or Anywhere Else In The World, Then Where Are They Going To Go?

We Should Never Allow Computers To Make Inherently Governmental Decisions In Terms Of The Application Of Military Force, Even If That's Happening On The Internet.

I Wasn't Trying To Change The Laws Or Slow Down The Machine. Maybe I Should Have. My Critics Say That I Was Not Revolutionary Enough. But They Forget That I Am A Product Of The System. I Worked Those Desks, I Know Those People And I Still Have Some Faith In Them, That The Services Can Be Reformed.

Going All The Way Back To Daniel Ellsberg, It Is Clear That The Government Is Not Concerned With Damage To National Security, Because In None Of These Cases Was There Damage.

Because, Remember, I Didn't Want To Change Society. I Wanted To Give Society A Chance To Determine If It Should Change Itself.

When People Conceptualize A Cyber-attack, They Do Tend To Think About Parts Of The Critical Infrastructure Like Power Plants, Water Supplies, And Similar Sort Of Heavy Infrastructure, Critical Infrastructure Areas. And They Could Be Hit, As Long As They're Network Connected, As Long As They Have Some Kind Of Systems That Interact With Them That Could Be Manipulated From Internet Connection.

I Told The Government I'd Volunteer For Prison, As Long As It Served The Right Purpose.

Every Time We Walk On To The Field Of Battle And The Field Of Battle Is The Internet, It Doesn't Matter If We Shoot Our Opponents A Hundred Times And Hit Every Time. As Long As They've Hit Us Once, We've Lost, Because The U.s. Is So Much More Reliant On Those Systems.

We Have To Argue Forcefully And Demand That The Government Recognise That These Programmes Do Not Prevent - Mass Surveillance Does Not Prevent Acts Of Terrorism.

We're Now More Than A Year Since My Nsa Revelations, And Despite Numerous Hours Of Testimony Before Congress, Despite Tons Of Off-the-record Quotes From Anonymous Officials Who Have An Ax To Grind, Not A Single Us Official, Not A Single Representative Of The United States Government, Has Ever Pointed To A Single Case Of Individualized Harm Caused By These Revelations. This, Despite The Fact That Former Nsa Director Keith Alexander Said This Would Cause Grave And Irrevocable Harm To The Nation.

When People Are Talking About Cyber Weapons, Digital Weapons, What They Really Mean Is A Malicious Program That's Used For A Military Purpose. A Cyber Weapon Could Be Something As Simple As An Old Virus From 1995 That Just Happens To Still Be Effective If You Use It For That Purpose.

That's The Key - To Maintain The Garden Of Liberty, Right? This Is A Generational Thing That We Must All Do Continuously. We Only Have The Rights That We Protect. It Doesn't Matter What We Say Or Think We Have. It's Not Enough To Believe In Something; It Matters What We Actually Defend.

If We Allow The United States To Set The Precedent That National Borders Don't Matter When It Comes To The Protection Of People's Information, Other Countries Are Watching. They're Paying Attention To Our Examples And What Is Normative Behavior In Terms Of Dealing With Digital Information.

These [nsa] Programs Were Never About Terrorism: They're About Economic Spying, Social Control, And Diplomatic Manipulation. They're About Power.

When We Have Some Horrible Terrorist Attacks Happen In Some Country We See In The Recording That Follows, That The Intelligence Community Already Knew About These People In Advance. We Know That These Countries Were Involved In Intelligence Sharing Premiums, That They Benefited From Mass Surveillance, And Yet They Didn't Stop The Attacks. Yet At The Same Time We Immediately See Intelligence Officials Running To The Newspapers And Claiming That We Need More Surveillance, That We Need More Intrusion, That We Need More Expense Of Powers Because It Could Have Stopped An Attack.

We Decentralise Permissions Over The Use Of Our Communications.

When You Are Subverting The Power Of Government, That's A Fundamentally Dangerous Thing To Democracy.

I Don't Think It Is The Most Important Thing. I Think It Is The Fact That The Director Of National Intelligence Gave A False Statement To Congress Under Oath, Which Is A Felony. If We Allow Our Officials To Knowingly Break The Law Publicly And Face No Consequences, We're Instituting A Culture Of Immunity, And This Is What I Think Historically Will Actually Be Considered The Biggest Disappointment Of The [barack] Obama Administration.

I'm Not A Spy For Russia Or China Or Any Other Country For That Matter.

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.

I Don't Think I Have Committed A Crime Outside The Domain Of The Us.

The Issue Is We're Losing Leverage. Governments Are Increasingly Getting More Power And We Are Increasingly Losing Our Ability To Control That Power, And Even To Be Aware Of That Power.

People In Both Parties From The Congressional Intelligence Committees - All These Co-opted Officials Who Play Cheerleader For Spy Agencies - Go On These Sunday Shows And They Say: "snowden Was A Traitor. He Works Against Americans. He Works For The Chinese. Oh, Wait, He Left Hong Kong - He Works For The Russians."

We Decentralise The Ability To Decide The Level Of Publicity That's Attached To Any Of Our Communications.

We Do Not Live In A Revolutionary Time. People Are Not Prepared To Contest Power.

There Is A Technical Solution To Every Political Problem...

The Bare Bones Tools For A Cyber-attack Are To Identify A Vulnerability In The System You Want To Gain Access To Or You Want To Subvert Or You Want To Deny, Destroy, Or Degrade, And Then To Exploit It, Which Means To Send Codes, Deliver Code To That System Somehow And Get That Code To That Vulnerability, To That Crack In Their Wall, Jam It In There, And Then Have It Execute.

If Even One Country, An Iceland For Example, Defects From This Global Legislative Bargain And Says No, We're Not Going To Enforcement Mass Surveillance Here. We're Not Going To Do That. That's Where All Of The Data Centres, All The Service Providers In The World Will Relocate To. And I Think That Gives Us A Real Chance To See A More Liberal Than Authoritarian Future.

If I Am Traitor, Who Did I Betray? I Gave All My Information To The American Public, To American Journalists Who Are Reporting On American Issues. If They See That As Treason, I Think People Really Need To Consider Who They Think They're Working For. The Public Is Supposed To Be Their Boss, Not Their Enemy.

I Don't Want To Live In A World Where There's No Privacy, And Therefore No Room For Intellectual Exploration And Creativity.

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.

We've Seen A Departure From The Traditional Work Of The National Security Agency. They've Become Sort Of The National Hacking Agency, The National Surveillance Agency. And They've Lost Sight Of The Fact That Everything They Do Is Supposed To Make Us More Secure As A Nation And A Society.

As A Technologist, I See The Trends, And I See That Automation Inevitably Is Going To Mean Fewer And Fewer Jobs. And If We Do Not Find A Way To Provide A Basic Income For People Who Have No Work, Or No Meaningful Work, We’re Going To Have Social Unrest That Could Get People Killed. When We Have Increasing Production - Year After Year After Year - Some Of That Needs To Be Reinvested In Society.

To Do That They, The Nsa Specifically, Targets The Communications Of Everyone. It Ingests Them By Default. It Collects Them In Its System And It Filters Them And It Analyses Them And It Measures Them And It Stores Them For Periods Of Time Simply Because That's The Easiest, Most Efficient, And Most Valuable Way To Achieve These Ends. So While They May Be Intending To Target Someone Associated With A Foreign Government Or Someone They Suspect Of Terrorism, They're Collecting You're Communications To Do So.

You Shouldn't Change Your Behavior Because A Government Agency Somewhere Is Doing The Wrong Thing. If You Sacrifice Your Values Because You're Afraid, You Don't Care About Those Values Very Much.

You Have Ceded The Concept Of Your Own Rights. You've Converted Them Into Something You Get As A Revocable Privilege From The Government, Something That Can Be Abrogated At Its Convenience. And That Has Diminished The Measure Of Liberty Within A Society.

The Work Of A Generation Is Beginning Here, With Your Hearings, And You Have The Full Measure Of My Gratitude And Support.

I Went To St. Petersburg - St. Petersburg Is Awesome.

The New York Times And The Guardian Came Out And Said, "hey, Clemency For Snowden." But For Me, The Key - And I've Said This From The Beginning: It's Not About Me. I Don't Care If I Get Clemency. I Don't Care What Happens To Me.

If The Government Or The Parties Won't Address Our Needs, We Will. It's About Direct Action, Even Civil Disobedience.

The Majority Of People In Developed Countries Spend At Least Some Time Interacting With The Internet, And Governments Are Abusing That Necessity In Secret To Extend Their Powers Beyond What Is Necessary And Appropriate.

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.

Intelligence Services

There Are Unquestionable Violations Of Our Constitution.

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?

Russia Recently Passed A Law - I Think A Terrible Law - Which Says You Have To Store All Of The Data From Russian Citizens On Russian Soil Just To Prevent Other Countries From Playing The Same Kind Of Legal Games We're Playing In This Microsoft Case.

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.

There's No Question That The Us Is Engaged In Economic Spying. If There's Information At Siemens That They Think Would Be Beneficial To The National Interests, Not The National Security Of The United States, They'll Go After That Information And They'll Take It.

The New Iphone Has Encryption That Protects The Contents Of The Phone. This Means If Someone Steals Your Phone - If A Hacker Or Something Images Your Phone - They Can't Read What's On The Phone Itself, They Can't Look At Your Pictures, They Can't See The Text Messages You Send, And So Forth. But It Does Not Stop Law Enforcement From Tracking Your Movements Via Geolocation On The Phone If They Think You Are Involved In A Kidnapping Case, For Example.

Nobody's Going To Vote For Terrorism. So Our Governments Don't Have That Sort Of Political Pressure To Act In A Responsible Manner When It Comes To Stewardship Of Our Rights.

We Have To Recognise That Rights Are Being Violated. The United Nations Actually Filed A Report That Found That That Was The Case, That Mass Surveillance Is A Violation Of Rights.

Imagine, If You Will, You're Sitting At My Desk In Hawaii. You Have Access To The Entire World, As Far As You Can See It. Last Several Days, Content Of Internet Communications. Every Email That's Sent. Every Website That's Visited By Every Individual. Every Text Message That Somebody Sends On Their Phone. Every Phone Call They Make.

While The Us Constitution Marks These Programs As Illegal, My Government Argues That Secret Court Rulings, Which The World Is Not Permitted To See, Somehow Legitimize An Illegal Affair. These Rulings Simply Corrupt The Most Basic Notion Of Justice - That It Must Be Seen To Be Done. The Immoral Cannot Be Made Moral Through The Use Of Secret Law.

I Think We're Going To See A Move Away From That, Because Young People - Digital Natives Who Spend Their Life On The Internet - Get Saturated. It's Like A Fashion Trend, And Becomes A Sign Of A Lack Of Sophistication.

People Would Publish Their Websites; Other People Would Read Them. But There Was No Real Back And Forth Other Than Through E-mail. Web 2.0 Was What They Called The Collaborative Web - Facebook, Twitter, The Social Media.

Governments Cannot Require Individuals, They Cannot Require The Public As A Body, And They Cannot Require Corporations To Make Investigation And Law Enforcement Easy For Them In A Liberal Society.

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.

I Have Used Mass Surveillance To Target People, So I Do Know How It Works.

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.

The New Iphone Encryption Does Not Stop Them From Accessing Copies Of Your Pictures Or Whatever That Are Uploaded To, For Example, Apple's Cloud Service, Which Are Still Legally Accessible Because Those Are Not Encrypted. It Only Protects What's Physically On The Phone.

We've Already Seen, In Practically Every Country Around The World Where These Issues Have Been Covered, That The General Public Has Recoiled At The Ideology Behind These Programs.

We're Opening The Doors To People Launching Missiles And Dropping Bombs By Taking The Human Out Of The Decision Chain For Deciding How We Should Respond To These Threats. And This Is Something We're Seeing More And More Happening In The Traditional Means As Our Methods Of Warfare Become Increasingly Automated And Roboticized Such As Through Drone Warfare.

My Intention Is To Ask The Courts And People Of Hong Kong To Decide My Fate.

The Only Way I Could Be Extradited Is Through The Principle Of What My Lawyers Call "politics Trumps Law."

I Believe Strongly That Occupy Wall Street Had Such Limits Because The Local Authorities Were Able To Enforce, Basically In Our Imaginations, An Image Of What Proper Civil Disobedience Is - One That Is Simply Ineffective.

I Talk To Cryptographers, Some Of The Leading Technologists In The World, All The Time About How We Can Deal With These Issues. It Is Not Possible To Create A Back Door That Is Only Accessible, For Example, To The Fbi.

If We Don't Do Anything, If We Go Along With The Status Quo, We Are Going To Have A Mass Surveillance World.

I Don't Think It's Going To Be Related To Social Or Economic Policies; It's Going To Be The Fact That [barack Obama] Said Let's Go Forward, Not Backward, In Regard To The Violations Of Law That Occurred Under The Bush Administration.

We've Got Crazy Little Sites Going Up Against Established Media Behemoths.

Lawyers From The Nsa, As Well As The Uk's Gchq, Work Very Hard To Search For Loopholes In Laws And Constitutional Protections That They Can Use To Justify Indiscriminate, Dragnet Surveillance Operations That Were At Best Unwittingly Authorized By Lawmakers.

If We Simply Follow The Rules That A State Imposes Upon Us When That State Is Acting Contrary To The Public Interest, We're Not Actually Improving Anything. We're Not Changing Anything.

We Are A Representative Democracy. But How Did We Get There? We Got There Through Direct Action. And That's Enshrined In Our Constitution And In Our Values.

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.

The Way The United States Intelligence Community Operates Is It Doesn't Limit Itself To The Protection Of The Homeland. It Doesn't Limit Itself To Countering Terrorist Threats, Countering Nuclear Proliferation. It's Also Used For Economic Espionage, For Political Spying To Gain Some Knowledge Of What Other Countries Are Doing.

All Those People Who Went Out [to Occupy Wall Street] Missed Work, Didn't Get Paid. Those Were Individuals Who Were Already Feeling The Effects Of Inequality, So They Didn't Have A Lot To Lose. And Then The Individuals Who Were Louder, More Disruptive And, In Many Ways, More Effective At Drawing Attention To Their Concerns Were Immediately Castigated By Authorities. They Were Cordoned Off, Pepper-sprayed, Thrown In Jail.

I Hope You Have Read The Election Programme Of The Labour Party...this Is Not Socialism. It Is Bolshevism Run Mad.

You Are Not Even Aware Of What Is Possible. The Extent Of Their Capabilities Is Horrifying. We Can Plant Bugs In Machines. Once You Go On The Network, I Can Identify Your Machine. You Will Never Be Safe Whatever Protections You Put In Place.

You Will Never Be Completely Free From Risk If You're Free. The Only Time You Can Be Free From Risk Is When You're In Prison.

After 9/11, Many Of The Most Important News Outlets In America Abdicated Their Role As A Check To Power - The Journalistic Responsibility To Challenge The Excesses Of Government - For Fear Of Being Seen As Unpatriotic And Punished In The Market During A Period Of Heightened Nationalism.

Since The Revelations, We Have Seen A Massive Sea Change In The Technological Basis And Makeup Of The Internet.

There Is A Policy Response That Needs To Occur. There Is Also A Technical Response That Needs To Occur. It Is The Development Community That Can Really Craft The Solutions And Make Sure We Are Safe.

I Believe That At This Point In History, The Greatest Danger To Our Freedom And Way Of Life Comes From The Reasonable Fear Of Omniscient State Powers Kept In Check By Nothing More Than Policy Documents.

Government Spying

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.

There Have Been Times Throughout American History Where What Is Right Is Not The Same As What Is Legal. Sometimes To Do The Right Thing You Have To Break The Law.

American History

[sovereignty] Would Break The American Monopoly, But It Would Also Break Internet Business, Because You'd Have To Have A Data Center In Every Country. And Data Centers Are Tremendously Expensive, A Big Capital Investment.

Internet Business

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