Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowdenis an American computer professional, former Central Intelligence Agencyemployee, and former contractor for the United States government who copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agencyin 2013 without prior authorization. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionOther
Date of Birth21 June 1983
CityElizabeth City, NC
CountryUnited States of America
Edward Snowden quotes about
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.
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.
There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watching what's happening, and goes, 'This is something that's not our place to decide.' The public needs to decide whether these programs or policies are right or wrong,
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 scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.
The question of whether I as a whistleblower should be pardoned is not for me to answer.
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.
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 love my country. I love my family. And I have dedicated my life to both of them.