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Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2025 Update)
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Edward Snowden Quote: “The best means we have for keeping our keys safe is called “zero knowledge,” a method that ensures that any data you try to store externally – say, for instance, on a company’s cloud platform – is encrypted by an algorithm running on your device before it is uploaded, and the key is never shared. In the zero knowledge scheme, the keys are in the users’ hands – and only in the users’ hands. No company, no agency, no enemy can touch them.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The guy who started the Arab Spring was almost exactly my age. He was a produce peddler in Tunisia, selling fruits and vegetables out of a cart. In protest against repeated harassment and extortion by the authorities, he stood in the square and set fire to his life, dying a martyr.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “It’s been six years since I came forward because I witnessed a decline in the commitment of so-called advanced governments throughout the world to protecting this privacy, which I regard – and the United Nations regards – as a fundamental human right. In the span of those years, however, this decline has only continued as democracies regress into authoritarian populism.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system – its government – had decided that it functioned best when broken.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Democracy could never be imposed at the point of a gun, but perhaps it could be sown by the spread of silicon and fiber.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “That’s just the way the Internet works: you get curious and your fingers do the thinking for you.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Instead, I was resolved to bring to light a single, all-encompassing fact: that my government had developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “NSA’s announcement of the construction of a vast new data facility in Bluffdale, Utah.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “In fact, many of the rights most cherished by citizens of democracies aren’t even provided for in law except by implication.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “From 2007 to 2009, I was stationed at the US Embassy in Geneva as one of the rare technologists deployed under diplomatic cover, tasked with bringing the CIA into the future by bringing its European stations online, digitizing and automating the network by which the US government spied.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “America must have a greater commitment to justice than it does simply to the law.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “What China was doing publicly to its own citizens, America might be – could be – doing secretly to the world.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “I’d wake the computer up and go online, holding my pillows against the machine to stifle the dial tone of the modem and the ever-intensifying hiss of its connection.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time – a stretch that, fortunately for me, coincided almost exactly with my adolescence – the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Therein lies the project’s irony: here was a US military–developed technology that made cyberintelligence simultaneously harder and easier, applying hacker know-how to protect the anonymity of IC officers, but only at the price of granting that same anonymity to adversaries and to average users across the globe. In this sense, Tor was even more neutral than Switzerland.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Please produce an autobiographical statement of no fewer than 1,000 words.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “We are the first people in the history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that our collected records might have an eternal existence. This is why we have a special duty. We must ensure that these records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our children.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The internet showed me the sheer quantity and variety of talent that existed, and made clear that in order to flourish I had to specialise.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Direct engagement, which can be harsh and emotionally draining, simply doesn’t happen that much on the technical side of intelligence, and almost never in computing. There is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a screen. Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limit any meaningful confrontation with their consequences.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “I was outraged, yes, but that was only the beginning of a process in which my heart completely defeated my rational judgment. I accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The 2008 crisis, which laid so much of the foundation for the crises of populism that a decade later would sweep across Europe and America, helped me realize that something that is devastating for the public can be, and often is, beneficial to the elites.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “IC, which tends to focus less on deniability and more on never getting caught in the first place. Instead, the primary purpose served by IC contracting is much more mundane: it’s a workaround, a loophole, a hack that lets agencies circumvent federal caps on hiring.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “It’s this egalitarian nature of hacking – which doesn’t care who you are, just how you reason – that makes it such a reliable method of dealing with the type of authority figures so convinced of their system’s righteousness that it never occurred to them to test it.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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. American politicians weren’t as afraid of terror as they were of seeming weak, or of being disloyal to their party, or of being disloyal to their campaign donors, who had ample appetites for government contracts and petroleum products from the Middle East.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The fact is, no one with a biography like mine ever comes comfortably to autobiography. It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification, only to turn around completely and share “personal disclosures” in a book.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens’ private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “As the years go by, it has become increasingly apparent to me that legislatively reforming the surveillance regime of the country of my birth won’t necessarily help a journalist or dissident in the country of my exile, but an encrypted smartphone miht.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Nothing I could come up with would have raised even an iota of eyebrow from investigators who are used to finding out that the middle-aged analyst at a think tank likes to wear diapers and get spanked by grandmothers in leather.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “I wanted to show that I wasn’t just a brain in a jar; I was also heart and muscle.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed – the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system – and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance. The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it. I wanted, I think, to be part of something.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The languages of regimes like Russia and China, for their part, employ terms that bear the pejorative sense of “snitch” and “traitor.” It would take the existence of a strong free press in those societies to imbue those words with a more positive coloration, or to coin new ones that would frame disclosure not as a betrayal but as an honorable duty.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast strange city, trying to find some roses. Red roses, white roses, even blue violets. Any flowers I can find. I don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and point.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The Intelligence Community tries to inculcate in its workers a baseline anonymity, a sort of blank-page personality upon which to inscribe secrecy and the art of imposture. You train yourself to be inconspicuous, to look and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary house, you drive the most ordinary car, you wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else. The difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the ordinary, is your cover.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “If folks as fundamentally decent and selfless as these aren’t deemed worthy of the protection of the state, it’s because the state itself is unworthy.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a “private” business.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage. The old explanations for why a country might try to maintain a notionally sovereign physical presence on another country’s soil faded into obsolescence with the rise of electronic communications and jet-powered aircraft.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “The attempts by elected officials to delegitimize journalism have been aided and abetted by a full-on assault on the principle of truth. What is real is being purposefully conflated with what is fake, through technologies that are capable of scaling that conflation into unprecedented global confusion.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Everyone has something, some compromising information buried among their bytes – if not in their files then in their email, if not in their email then in their browsing history. And now this information was being stored by the US government.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “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.”
Edward Snowden Quote: “Of course, Mae could’ve paid me in smiles – because I was smitten, just totally in love with her.”
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