Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

102. “The sad truth is that societies that demand whistleblowers be martyrs often find themselves without either, and always when it matters the most.”

— Edward Snowden

103. “I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”

— Edward Snowden

104. “The internet has to be protected from intrusive monitoring or else the medium upon which we all rely for the basis of our economy and our normal life, we’ll lose that, and it’s going to have broad effects as a consequence that we cannot predict.”

— Edward Snowden

105. “Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President.”

— Edward Snowden

106. “We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art. It’s a basic protection.”

— Edward Snowden

107. “The US government still has no idea what documents I have because encryption works.”

— Edward Snowden

108. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

109. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

110. “The ‘music’ is not an open court and a fair trial.”

— Edward Snowden

111. “My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.”

— Edward Snowden

112. “I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.”

— Edward Snowden

113. “We are no longer citizens, we no longer have leaders. We’re subjects, and we have rulers.”

— Edward Snowden

114. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

115. “I have no relationship with the Russian government at all.”

— Edward Snowden

116. “I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.”

— Edward Snowden

117. “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

— Edward Snowden

118. “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

— Edward Snowden

119. “Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”

— Edward Snowden

120. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

121. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

122. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

123. “If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public.”

— Edward Snowden

124. “Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.”

— Edward Snowden

125. “You can’t come up against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.”

— Edward Snowden

126. “You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities – the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you want to cartwheel through later on a flaming horse, correcting the record with your sword of justice.”

— Edward Snowden

127. “When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is okay. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.”

— Edward Snowden

128. “We can’t erase the things that shame us, or the ways we’ve shamed ourselves, online. All we can do is control our reactions – whether we let the past oppress us, or accept its lessons, grow, and move on.”

— Edward Snowden

129. “When people are talking about cyber weapons, digital weapons, what they really mean is a malicious program that’s used for a military purpose. A cyber weapon could be something as simple as an old virus from 1995 that just happens to still be effective if you use it for that purpose.”

— Edward Snowden

130. “They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.”

— Edward Snowden

131. “I’m not a spy, which is the real question.”

— Edward Snowden

132. “People have to be free to investigate computer security. People have to be free to look for the vulnerabilities and create proof of concept code to show that they are true vulnerabilities in order for us to secure our systems.”

— Edward Snowden

133. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

134. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

135. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

136. “As a general rule, so long as you have any choice at all, you should never route through or peer with the UK under any circumstances. Their fibers are radioactive, and even the Queen’s selfies to the pool boy get logged.”

— Edward Snowden

137. “There are programs such as the NSA paying RSA $10 million to use an insecure encryption standard by default in their products. That’s making us more vulnerable not just to the snooping of our domestic agencies, but also foreign agencies.”

— Edward Snowden

138. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

139. “You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. 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.”

— Edward Snowden

140. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

141. “If an adversary didn’t target our power plants but they did target the core routers, the backbones that tie our internet connections together, entire parts of the United States could be cut off. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash.”

— Edward Snowden

142. “I’m still working for the government.”

— Edward Snowden

143. “When it comes to cyber conflicts between, say, America and China or even a Middle Eastern nation, an African nation, a Latin American nation, a European nation, we have more to lose.”

— Edward Snowden

144. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

145. “I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law.”

— Edward Snowden

146. “One of the foremost activities of the NSA’s FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.”

— Edward Snowden

147. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

148. “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.”

— Edward Snowden

149. “We’ve learned that we’ve allowed technological capabilities to dictate policies and practices, rather than ensuring that our laws and values guide our technological capabilities.”

— Edward Snowden

150. “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.”

— Edward Snowden