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.

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.

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

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.

If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search engine—and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example—then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.

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

At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.

When we've got these people who have practically limitless powers within a society, if they get a pass without so much as a slap on the wrist, what example does that set for the next group of officials that come into power? To push the lines a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, and we'll realize that we're no longer citizens - we're subjects.

Most people, even today, tend to think of mass surveillance in terms of content - the actual words they use when they make a phone call or write an email. The unfortunate truth, however, is that the content of our communications is rarely as revealing as its other elements - the unwritten, unspoken information that can expose the broader context and patterns of behavior.