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The United States Is More Reliant On The Technical Systems. We're More Reliant On The Critical Infrastructure Of The Internet Than Any Other Nation Out There. And When There's Such A Low Barrier To Entering The Domain Of Cyber-attacks We're Starting A Fight That We Can't Win.

-Edward Snowden

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The United States Is

Edward Snowden

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The United States Is More Reliant On The Technical Systems. We're More Reliant On The Critical Infrastructure Of The Internet Than Any Other Nation Out There. And When There's Such A Low Barrier To Entering The Domain Of Cyber-attacks We're Starting A Fight That We Can't Win.

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More From Edward Snowden

The Issue I Brought Forward Most Clearly Was That Of Mass Surveillance, Not Of Surveillance In General.

I Understand That I Will Be Made To Suffer For My Actions, And That The Return Of This Information To The Public Marks My End.

Government Spying

There's No Saving Me.

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.

Unintended Consequences

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.

I Have No Intention Of Hiding Who I Am Because I Know I Have Done Nothing Wrong.

Government Spying

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.

In Liberal Societies We Don't Typically Require Citizens To Rearrange Their Activities, Their Lives, The Way They Go About Their Business, To Make It Easy For The Police To Do Their Work.

Hong Kong Has A Reputation For Freedom In Spite Of The People's Republic Of China. It Has A Strong Tradition Of Free Speech.

The Iraq War That I Signed Up For Was Launched On False Premises. The American People Were Misled. Now, Whether That Was Due To Bad Faith Or Simply Mistakes In Intelligence, I Can't Say For Sure. But I Can Say It Shows The Problem Of Putting Too Much Faith In Intelligence Systems Without Debating Them In Public.

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.

As For Labeling Someone A Whistleblower, I Think It Does Them - It Does All Of Us - A Disservice, Because It "otherizes" Us.

I Do Not Want To Live In A World Where Everything I Do And Say Is Recorded. That Is Not Something I Am Willing To Support Or Live Under.

Government Spying

Ever Since I've Been Here [in Russia], My Life Has Been Consumed With Work That's Actually Fulfilling And Satisfying.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The United States Need To Be Focusing More On Creating A More Secure, More Reliable, More Robust, And More Trusted Internet, Not One That's Weaker, Not One That Relies On This Systemic Model Of Exploiting Every Vulnerability, Every Threat Out There.

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

I Built My Own Studio. I Don't Have The Professional Language To Describe It Because I'm Not A Videographer - But I'm A Technician. So I Get The Camera, I Get All The Things That Translate The Camera To The Computer, I Set Up A Live Session, I Do The Security On It, I Set Up A Background So I Can Key It Out, Like Newscasters Do, And Replace It With Whatever I Want - And I Can Be Anywhere I Need To Be.

From The Very Beginning, I Said There Are Two Tracks Of Reform: There's The Political And The Technical. I Don't Believe The Political Will Be Successful, For Exactly The Reasons You Underlined. The Issue Is Too Abstract For Average People, Who Have Too Many Things Going On In Their Lives.

My Whole Model, From The Beginning, Was Not To Personally Publish A Single Document. I Provided These Documents To Journalists Because I Didn't Want My Biases To Decide What's In The Public Interest And What Is Not.

We Reject Techniques Like Torture Regardless Of Whether They're Effective Or Ineffective Because They Are Barbaric And Harmful On A Broad Scale. It's The Same Thing With Cyber Warfare. We Should Never Be Attacking Hospitals. We Should Never Be Taking Down Power Plants Unless That Is Absolutely Necessary To Ensure Our Continued Existence As A Free People.

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

There Are Proxies, Proxy Servers On The Internet, And This Is Very Typical For Hackers To Use. They Create What Are Called Proxy Chains Where They Gain Access To A Number Of Different Systems Around The World, Sometimes By Hacking These, And They Use Them As Sort Of Relay Boxes.

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

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

The Question Is: Particularly In The Post-9/11 Era, Are Societies Becoming More Liberal Or More Authoritarian?

It's Much Easier, I Think, To Protect Communications While They're In Transit At Least, Than It Is To Enforce Legislation In Every Country In The World To Say That You Can't Do This.

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.

The Question That We, As A Society, Have To Ask Is, Are Our Collective Rights Worth A Small Relative Advantage In Our Ability To Spy On Other Countries And Foreign Citizens? I Have My Opinion About That, But We All Collectively Have To Come To Our Opinion About It.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Child Born Today Will Grow Up With No Conception Of Privacy At All.

We Have To Be Able To Reject Disproportionate And Unjustified Responses In The Cyber Domain Just As We Do In The Physical Domain.

The Reality Is If We Sit Back And Allow A Few Officials Behind Closed Doors To Launch Offensive Attacks Without Any Oversight Against Foreign Nations, Against People We Don't Like, Against Political Groups, Radicals, And Extremists Whose Ideas We May Not Agree With, And Could Be Repulsive Or Even Violent - If We Let That Happen Without Public Buy-in, We Won't Have Any Seat At The Table Of Government To Decide Whether Or Not It's Appropriate For These Officials To Drag Us Into Some Kind Of War Activity That We Don't Want, But We Weren't Aware Of At The Time.

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.

If You Ask Anybody At Cyber Command Or Look At Any Of The Job Listings For Openings For Their Positions, You'll See That The One Thing They Don't Prioritize Is Computer Network Defense. It's All About Computer Network Attack And Computer Network Exploitation At Cyber Command.

I Don't Want To Directly Confront Great Powers, Which We Cannot Defeat On Their Terms. They Have More Money, More Clout, More Airtime. We Cannot Be Effective Without A Mass Movement, And The American People Today Are Too Comfortable To Adapt To A Mass Movement.

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.

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

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

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.

A Zero-day Exploit Is A Method Of Hacking A System. It's Sort Of A Vulnerability That Has An Exploit Written For It, Sort Of A Key And A Lock That Go Together To A Given Software Package. It Could Be An Internet Web Server. It Could Be Microsoft Office. It Could Be Adobe Reader Or It Could Be Facebook.

One Of The Kind Of Unexpectedly Liberating Things Of Becoming This Global Fugitive Is The Fact That You Don't Worry So Much About Tomorrow. You Think More About Today. And Unexpectedly, I Like That Very Much.

America Should Be Cooling Down The Tensions In The Internet, Making It A More Trusted Environment, Making It A More Secure Environment, Making It A More Reliable Environment, Because That's The Foundation Of Our Economy And Our Future.

Your Rights Matter, Because You Never Know When You're Going To Need Them.

Internet Exchanges And Internet Service Providers - International Fiber Optic Landing Points - These Are The Key Tools That Governments Go After In Order To Enable Their Programs Of Mass Surveillance. If They Want To Be Able To Watch The Entire Population Of A Country Instead Of A Single Individual, You Have To Go After Those Bulk Interchanges.

It Is Afraid Of An Informed, Angry Public Demanding The Constitutional Government It Was Promised - And It Should Be.

We Have A Media That Goes Along With The Government By Parroting Phrases Intended To Provoke A Certain Emotional Response - For Example, "national Security." Everyone Says "national Security" To The Point That We Now Must Use The Term "national Security." But It Is Not National Security That They're Concerned With; It Is State Security. And That's A Key Distinction.

The Consent Of The Governed Is Not Consent If It Is Not Informed.

Consent Of The Governed

We Need To Put The Security Back In The National Security Agency. We Can't Have The National Surveillance Agency.

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

In The United States And Some Of The Other Countries Involved It's Sort Of A "five Eyes" Global Spying Alliance. That's The Us, Uk, Canada, New Zealand, And Australia. They've Had A Little Bit Of A More Muscular Public Response. Now, They Haven't Been Satisfying Or Really Meaningful In Any Country Yet. But They Have Been Engaging.

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

We Are No Longer Citizens, We No Longer Have Leaders. We're Subjects, And We Have Rulers.

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

There Can Be No Faith In Government If Our Highest Offices Are Excused From Scrutiny - They Should Be Setting The Example Of Transparency.

I'm Familiar With Andrei Sakharov Reputation, But I Don't Know His Personal History At All.

Personal History

When People Say, "i Have Nothing To Hide," What They're Saying Is, "my Rights Don't Matter."

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.

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

People Say That [i'm A Celebrity], But I've Only Had To Sign Autographs For "civ-libs" Types. And I Autograph Court Orders.

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.

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.

Us Has To Be Able To Rely On A Safe And Interconnected Internet In Order To Compete With Other Countries.

This Whole Pre-criminal Investigation, Where We Watch Everybody, All The Time, Just In Case, Is Really An Extraordinary Departure From The Western Liberal Tradition.

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 Political Decision Has Been Made Not To Irritate The Intelligence Community. The Spy Agencies Are Really Embarrassed, They're Really Sore - The Revelations Really Hurt Their Mystique. The Last Ten Years, They Were Getting The Zero Dark Thirty Treatment - They're The Heroes. The Surveillance Revelations Bring Them Back To Big Brother Kind Of Narratives, And They Don't Like That At All.

Citizens With A Conscience Are Not Going To Ignore Wrong-doing Simply Because They'll Be Destroyed For It: The Conscience Forbids It.

Acting Government Officials, They Said They Wanted - They Would Be Happy, They Would Love To Put A Bullet In My Head, To Poison Me As I Was Returning From The Grocery Store, And Have Me Die In The Shower.

I Don't Think Political Reform Is Likely To Succeed. [senators Tom] Udall And [ron] Wyden, On The Intelligence Committee, Have Been Sounding The Alarm, But They Are A Minority.

You Don't Need To Justify Your Rights As A Citizen - That Inverts The Model Of Responsibility. The Government Must Justify Its Intrusion Into Your Rights. If You Stop Defending Your Rights By Saying, "i Don't Need Them In This Context" Or "i Can't Understand This," They Are No Longer Rights.

When Laura Poitras Asked Me If She Could Film Our Encounters, I Was Extremely Reluctant. I’m Grateful That I Allowed Her To Persuade Me. The Result Is A Brave And Brilliant Film That Deserves The Honor And Recognition It Has Received. My Hope Is That This Award Will Encourage More People To See The Film And Be Inspired By Its Message That Ordinary Citizens, Working Together, Can Change The World.

When We Talk About The Assertion Of Basically New Government Privileges With Weak Or No Justification, We Don't Even Have To Look At International Law To See The Failings In Them.

I Will Be Satisfied If The Federation Of Secret Law, Unequal Pardon And Irresistible Executive Powers That Rule The World That I Love Are Revealed Even For An Instant.

Government Spying

It Is Interesting That So Many People Who Become Disenchanted, Who Protest Against Their Own Organizations, Are People Who Contributed Something To Them And Then Saw How It Was Misused.

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.

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.

The Community Of Technical Experts Who Really Manage The Internet, Who Built The Internet And Maintain It, Are Becoming Increasingly Concerned About The Activities Of Agencies Like The Nsa Or Cyber Command, Because What We See Is That Defense Is Becoming Less Of A Priority Than Offense.

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.

When Governments Go Too Far To Punish People For Actions That Are Dissent Rather Than A Real Threat To The Nation, They Risk Delegitimizing Not Just Their Systems Of Justice, But The Legitimacy Of The Government Itself. Because When They Bring Political Charges Against People For Acts That Were Clearly At Least Intended To Work In The Public Interest, They Deny Them The Opportunity To Mount A Public-interest Defense.

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

Government Spying

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

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.

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.

There Are Cyber Threats Out There, This Is A Dangerous World, And We Have To Be Safe, We Have To Be Secure No Matter The Cost.

Dangerous World

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.

One Of The Saddest And Most Damaging Legacies Of The [george W.] Bush Administration Is The Increased Assertion Of The "state Secrets" Privilege, Which Kept Organizations Like The Aclu - Which Had Cases Of People Who Had Actually Been Tortured And Held In Indefinite Detention - From Getting Their Day In Court.

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.

We Can't Simply Scare People Into Giving Up Their Rights, On The Basis, Oh, This Protects Us From Terrorism.

When The United States Cannibalize Dollars From The Defensive Business Of The Nsa, Securing Our Communications, Protecting Our Systems, Patching Zero-day Vulnerabilities, And Instead We're Giving Those Dollars To Be Used For Creating New Vulnerabilities In Our Systems So That They Can Surveil Us And Other People Abroad Who Use The Same Systems.

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.

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

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

It's Interesting That You Mention [andrei] Sakharov's Creative Axis - He Had Produced Something For The Government That He Then Realized Was Something Other Than He Intended. That's Something [nsa Whistleblower] Bill Binney And I Share.

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

The Big Tech Companies Understood That The Government Had Not Only Damaged American Principles, It Had Hurt Their Businesses.

A Different [ronald] Reagan-era Authority: Eo 12333, An Executive Order For Foreign-intelligence Collection, As Opposed To The Ones We Now Use Domestically. So This One Isn't Even Authorized By Law. It's Just An Old-ass Piece Of Paper With Reagan's Signature On It, Which Has Been Updated A Couple Times Since Then. So What Happened Was That All Of A Sudden These Massive, Behemoth Companies Realized Their Data Centers - Sending Hundreds Of Millions Of People's Communications Back And Forth Every Day - Were Completely Unprotected, Electronically Naked.

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

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

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.

Citizens Have To Fight Suppression Of Information On Matters Of Vital Public Importance. To Tell The Truth Is Not A Crime.

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.

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.

Being Confronted With The Realization That Work You Intended To Benefit People Is Being Used Against Them Has A Radicalizing Effect.

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

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.

The People At The Nsa Aren't Trying To Ruin Your Life. They're Not Trying To Put You In Authoritarian Dystopia. These Are Normal People Trying To Do Good Work In Hard Circumstances.

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?

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 Don't Spend All Day Running Hand-on-hat From Shadowy Figures - I'm In Exile.

Has The Center Of Gravity Shifted Such That All Governments Have Greater Powers And Fewer Restrictions Than They Ever Had, And Are Empowered By Technology In A Way That No Government Ever Was In The Past?

The Nsa And Israel Wrote Stuxnet Together.

Our Founders Did Not Write That 'we Hold These Truths To Be Self-evident, That All Us Persons Are Created Equal.'

As Inequality Grows, The Basic Bonds Of Social Fraternity Are Fraying - As We Discussed In Regard To Occupy Wall Street. As Tensions Increase, People Will Become More Willing To Engage In Protest. But That Moment Is Not Now.

So Many Of The Things We're Told By The Government Simply Aren't True.

[brazil] Went To The Un And Said, "we Need New Standards For This." We Need To Take A Look At What They're Calling "data Sovereignty."

It's Becoming Less And Less The National Security Agency And More And More The National Surveillance Agency. It's Gaining More Offensive Powers With Each Passing Year.

I Would Rather Be Without A State Than Without A Voice.

They [the Authorities] Will Act Aggressively Against Anyone Who Has Known Me. That Keeps Me Up At Night.

Much Of What I Saw In Geneva Really Disillusioned Me About How My Government Functions And What Its Impact Is In The World. I Realised That I Was Part Of Something That Was Doing Far More Harm Than Good.

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.

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.

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

You Shouldn't Send An Email From A Computer That's Associated With You If You Don't Want It To Be Tracked Back To You. You Don't Want To Hack The Power Plant From Your House If You Don't Want Them To Follow The Trail Back And See Your Ip Address.

We Can Still Publicly Post A Message To Facebook That's Globally Readable. But We Could Also Adjust Things So That They Can Only Be Shared With Those Closest To Us, And The Confident That This Is Enforced Through Both Legal And A Systemic Standards-based Protection.

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

The Only Thing I Fear Is The Harmful Effects On My Family, Who I Won't Be Able To Help Any More. That's What Keeps Me Up At Night.

Government Spying

As I Said Before, [patriotism] Is Distinct From Acting To Benefit The Government - A Distinction That's Increasingly Lost Today.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even If You're Not Doing Anything Wrong, You Are Being Watched And Recorded.

Government Spying

I Went To A Website The Other Day And Right At The Top Of The Page It Showed Me My Ip Address. It Was The Most Disturbing Moment I Have Ever Experienced. This Website Even Told Me What Internet Browser I Was Using, And What Day It Was. Computers Can Do Anything.

Presidents Should Not Be Exempted From The Same Standards Of Reason And Evidence And Justification That Any Other Citizen Or Civil Movement Should Be Held To.

All I Wanted Was For The Public To Be Able To Have A Say In How They Are Governed. That Is A Milestone We Left A Long Time Ago.

When We Look At How, Constitutionally, Only Congress Can Declare War, And That Is Routinely Ignored. Not Nato Or The Un, But Congress Has To Authorize These Endless Wars, And It Isn't.

The Us Government Is Not Going To Be Able To Cover This Up By Jailing Or Murdering Me. Truth Is Coming, And It Cannot Be Stopped.

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 I And Other Whistleblowers Are Sentenced To Long Years In Prison Without So Much As A Chance To Explain Our Motivations To A Jury, It Will Have A Deeply Chilling Effect On Future Whistleblowers Working As I Did To Expose Government Abuse And Overreach. It Will Chill Speech. It Will Corrode The Quality Of Our Democracy.

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.

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.

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.

We Have These Traditional Political Parties That Are Less And Less Responsive To The Needs Of Ordinary People, So People Are In Search Of Their Own Values.

I Carefully Evaluated Every Single Document I Disclosed To Ensure That Each Was Legitimately In The Public Interest. There Are All Sorts Of Documents That Would Have Made A Big Impact That I Didn't Turn Over, Because Harming People Isn't My Goal. Transparency Is.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

My Perspective Is If You're Not Willing To Be Called A Few Names To Help Out Your Country, You Don't Care Enough.

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.

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

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.

The Fbi Was Creating A World Where Citizens Rely On Apple To Defend Their Rights, Rather Than The Other Way Around.

The Question For Us Is Not What New Story Will Come Out Next. The Question Is, What Are We Going To Do About It?

I Think It's Reasonable That The Government, When It Has A Warrant From A Court, When It's Exposed To Scrutiny By A Legal Process That Would Be Upheld, Not Just Nationally, But Internationally As A Reliable And Robust Standard Rights Protection, They Can Enjoy Certain Powers. This Is No Different From Having The Police Able To Get A Warrant To Go And Search Your House, To Kick At Your Door Because They Think You're An Arms Dealer Or Something Like That. There Needs To Be A Process Involved, It Needs To Be Public, And It Needs To Be Challengeable In Court At All Times.

As For My Personal Politics, Some People Seem To Think I'm Some Kind Of Archlibertarian, A Hyper-conservative.

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.

I'm Still Alive, And I Don't Lose Sleep Because I Have Done What I Feel I Needed To Do, It Was The Right Thing To Do And I Am Not Going To Be Afraid.

The Definition Of A Security State Is One That Prioritizes Security Over All Other Considerations.

Let's Put It This Way. The United States Government Has Assembled A Massive Investigation Team Into Me Personally, Into My Work With The Journalists, And They Still Have No Idea What Documents Were Provided To The Journalist, What They Have, What They Don't Have, Because Encryption Works.

We Watch Our Own People More Closely Than Anyone Else In The World.

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.

If You Begin Acting Contrary To The Public's Interest, And There Is No Alternative Governmental Model, With Which You're Willing To Engage, We, The People, Will Have To Put Forth Our Own Extra Governmental Models And Methods Of Trying To Restore The Balance Of Liberty To The Liberal Tradition Of Western Society.

All I Was Was A Mechanism.

Nobody's Going To Vote For Isis.

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.

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.

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

There Are Even A Few [people] Who Still Honestly Believe I Sold Information To [vladimir] Putin - Like Personally, In Exchange For Asylum. And This Is After The Senate Intelligence Committee Chair, Who Gets To Read The Nsa's Reporting On My Activities Every Morning, Said All Of These Conspiracies Are Delusional.

By Leaning On Companies, By Leaning On Infrastructure Providers, By Leaning On Researchers, Graduate Students, Post-docs, Even Undergrads, To Look At The Challenges Having An Untrusted Internet, Where We Have To Put Our Communications On Wires That Are Owned By A Phone Company That We Can't Trust, That's Working In Collaboration With A Government That We Can't Trust, In Areas Around The World, We Can Restructure That Communications Fabric In A Way That It's Encrypted.

I Do Everything On The Computer. Tv Is Obsolete Technology For Me.

When You Think About The Abolition Of Slavery For Example, For The Ruling Class With The Rich White People Owning Plantations And States, And Things Like That, Slavery Was To Their Benefit. To Oppose It Didn't Make Any Sense At All On A Rational Basis. But On A Rights Basis, On A Principle Basis, It Made Obvious, Overwhelming Sense.

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.

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 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.

When It Comes To Social Policies, I Believe Women Have The Right To Make Their Own Choices, And Inequality Is A Really Important Issue.

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.

You Can Show A Guy Sort Of Peeking Over The Wall, You Can See A Guy Tunneling Underneath, You Can See A Guy Going Through The Front Door. All Of Those, In Cyber Terms, Are Vulnerabilities, Because It's Not That You Have To Look For One Hole Of A Specific Type. It's The Whole Paradigm.

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.

What We Need To Do Is We Need To Create New International Standards Of Behavior - Not Just National Laws, Because This Is A Global Problem. We Can't Just Fix It In The United States, Because There Are Other Countries That Don't Follow U.s. Laws. We Have To Create International Standards That Say That Cyber Attacks Should Only Ever Occur When It Is Absolutely Necessary.

[our System Of Education ]not Designed To Create Critical Thinkers.

When You Use Any Kind Of Internet Based Capability, Any Kind Of Electronic Capability, To Cause Damage To A Private Entity Or A Foreign Nation Or A Foreign Actor, These Are Potential Acts Of War.

So When They Say I'm A Low-level Systems Administrator, That I Don't Know What I'm Talking About, I'd Say It's Somewhat Misleading.

[barton ] Gellman Printed A Great Anecdote: He Showed Two Google Engineers A Slide That Showed How The Nsa Was Doing This, And The Engineers "exploded In Profanity."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Have No Relationship With The Russian Government At All.

Russian Government

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