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Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2025 Update)
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Edward Snowden Quote: “That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect intentionally integrated into every system, in both politics and computing: the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “You will understand, then, when I say that the Internet of today is unrecognizable. It’s worth noting that this change has been a conscious choice, the result of a systematic effort on the part of a privileged few.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The data we generate just by living – or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living – would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and advertisers.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The philosophy she lived by was the perfect training: say what you want, say who you are, never be ashamed. If they reject you, it’s their problem.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Once the ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage, all any government had to do was select a person or a group to scapegoat and go searching – as I’d gone searching through the agency’s files – for evidence of a suitable crime.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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. In capitalizing on these unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules as much as debunking them.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Terrorism, of course, was the stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “And so the geek inherited the earth.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “It’s unimaginable that a major bank or even a social media outfit would hire outsiders for systems-level work. In the context of the US government, however, restructuring your intelligence agencies so that your most sensitive systems were being run by somebody who didn’t really work for you was what passed for innovation.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “These public initiatives of mass surveillance proved, once and for all, that there could be no natural alliance between technology and government.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Other days, I just pick up some Burger King – I know where my loyalties lie – and play games I have to pirate because I can no longer use credit cards.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Put simply, computers were not designed to correct mistakes, but to hide them – and to hide them only from those parties who don’t know where to look.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The NSA’s conventional wisdom was that there was no point in collecting anything unless they could store it until it was useful, and there was no way to predict when exactly that would be. This rationalization was fuel for the agency’s ultimate dream, which is permanency – to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced for perpetuity, and so create a perfect memory. The permanent record.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called “liberty” and during the Internet Revolution is called “privacy.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Put simply, a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “One of the most difficult trials that a child of divorce has to face is being interrogated by one parent about the new life of the other.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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 Quote: “That a perfectly written set of commands would perfectly execute the same operations time and again would come to seem to me – as it did to so many smart, tech-inclined children of the millennium – the one stable saving truth of our generation.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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 Quote: “Even back then, I realized that any opposition to this system would be difficult, not least because getting its rules changed to serve the interests of the majority would involve persuading the rule makers to put themselves at a purposeful disadvantage. That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect intentionally integrated into every system, in both politics and computing: the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “This was the ultimate leap of faith, in a way: I could hardly trust anyone, so I had to trust everyone.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “After having had more blood taken from me than I’d ever imagined was in my body, I was eventually diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. It was both a seriously debilitating and seriously humiliating illness for me to have, not least because it’s usually contracted through what my classmates called “hooking up,” and at age fifteen the only “hooking up” I’d ever done involved a modem.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned. And the work that consumes them tends to require such specialized knowledge that to bring it up at a barbecue would get them disinvited from the next one, because nobody cared.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “It’s one of the great chastening facts of working with systems that the part of a system that malfunctions is almost never the part in which you notice the malfunction.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “After all, the only people on these boards were the people who could be there – who wanted to be there badly enough – who had the proficiency and passion, because the Internet of the 1990s wasn’t just one click away. It took significant effort just to log on.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The reason you’re reading this book is that I did a dangerous thing for a man in my position: I decided to tell the truth.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “During that seven-year stint, however, I participated in the most significant change in the history of American espionage – the change from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations. I helped make it technologically feasible for a single government to collect all the world’s digital communications, store them for ages, and search through them at will.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “This kind of change is constant, common, and human. But an autobiographical statement is static, the fixed document of a person in flux. This is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a statement but a pledge – a pledge to the principles they value, and to the vision of the person they hope to become.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “They’d call my name to tell me to wash up for dinner, but I’d pretend not to hear them.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “When your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “My parents would call my name to tell me to get ready for school, but I wouldn’t hear them.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “I’ve had friends tell me that you aren’t really an adult until you bury a parent or become one yourself.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The constitutional system only functions as a whole if and when each of its three branches works as intended. When all three don’t just fail, but fail deliberately and with coordination, the result is a culture of impunity.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “IC directors ask Congress for money to rent contract workers from private companies, congresspeople approve that money, and then those IC directors and congresspeople are rewarded, after they retire from office, by being given high-paying positions and consultancies with the very companies they’ve just enriched. From the vantage of the corporate boardroom, contracting functions as governmentally assisted corruption. It’s America’s most legal and convenient method of transferring.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “At school I could plead my case until I lost my voice, or I could just accept the fact that I’d never had a voice to begin with.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Which means that if you’re reading this now – this sentence – on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The more I came to know about the fragility of computer security, the more I worried over the consequences of trusting the wrong machine.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Tonight, we’re celebrating our anniversary. Lindsay moved out here three years ago, and two years ago today, we married.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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 Quote: “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.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Lindsay’s parents were also divorced: her mother and father lived twenty minutes apart, and as a kid Lindsay had been shuttled back and forth between them. She’d lived out of a bag.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Ultimately, every language, including English, demonstrates its culture’s relationship to power by how it chooses to define the act of disclosure. Even the nautically derived English words that seem neutral and benign frame the act from the perspective of the institution that perceives itself wronged, not of the public that the institution has failed.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “WE LANDED AT Sheremetyevo on June 23 for what we assumed would be a twenty-hour layover. It has now dragged on for over six years. Exile is an endless layover.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “According to Maryland Criminal Law Section 10-501, adultery is illegal and punishable by a $10 fine.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions, until we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we’re using are our own.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Prominent examples of the “Frankenstein effect” cited by after-the-fact civilian, governmental, military, and even IC assessments have included America’s funding and training of the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al-Qaeda, as well as the de-Baathification of the Saddam Hussein–era Iraqi military, which resulted in the rise of the Islamic state.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Many of the first 2,000 or so nights of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining, until – on night 2,193, the night I turned six years old – I discovered direct action. The authorities weren’t interested in calls for reform, and I wasn’t born yesterday.”
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