388 Quotes by Edward Snowden

Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.

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

Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can't give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. 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.

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.

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.

Ultimately, it was Super Mario Bros. that taught me what remains perhaps the most important lesson of my life. ... There is no turning back, only going forward — for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you. Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown.

I almost didn't take my abilities seriously, and didn't want to be praised for them or to success because of them. I'd wanted, instead, to be praised for something that was harder for me. I wanted to show that I wasn't just a brain in a jar, I was also a heart and muscle.

To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a "private" business.

I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system—its government—had decided that it functioned best when broken.