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Edward Snowden QUOTES

Edward Snowden QUOTES

1 " These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power. "

― Edward Snowden

2 " We'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends. "

― Edward Snowden

3 " I was right outside the NSA [on 9/11], so I remember the tension on that day. I remember hearing on the radio, 'the plane's hitting,' and I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time, was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it...I take the threat of terrorism seriously, and I think we all do. And I think it's really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort-of scandalize our memories to sort-of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through -- and to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don't need to give up, and that our Constitution says we should not give up. "

― Edward Snowden

4 " Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free. "

― Edward Snowden

5 " Study after study has show that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively *are* less free. "

― Edward Snowden

6 " Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. "

― Edward Snowden

7 " 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 government, but our agency in determining our futures. "

― Edward Snowden

8 " 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. "

― Edward Snowden

9 " Każdy nastolatek jest hakerem. Musi nim być, ponieważ życie w tym wieku bywa trudne do zniesienia. Nastolatkowi wydaje się, że jest dorosły, podczas gdy dorośli uważają go za dziecko. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

10 " The government should be afraid of the people, the people shouldn't be afraid of the government. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

11 " Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

12 " I hadn’t given much thought to answering the question of what to do once the game was over, mainly because a winning conclusion was always so unlikely. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

13 " cudowny okres, kiedy to internet tworzyli ludzie dla ludzi i kiedy to ludzie byli jego najważniejszą częścią. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

14 " To hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and exploiting all the vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually works, or could be made to work. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

15 " This was the ultimate leap of faith, in a way: I could hardly trust anyone, so I had to trust everyone. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

16 " Everyone has something, some compromising information buried among their bytes—if not in their files then in their email, if not in their email then in their browsing history. And now this information was being stored by the US government. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

17 " To digitize something is to record it, in a format that will last forever. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record

18 " Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it. "

― Edward Snowden

19 " Two things about the NSA stunned me right off the bat: how technologically sophisticated it was compared with the CIA, and how much less vigilant it was about security in its every iteration, from the compartmentalization of information to data encryption. "

― Edward Snowden

20 " Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons.

Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL, handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering with the users.

You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.”

If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you.

Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them. "

― Edward Snowden , Permanent Record