Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about after you’d violated them.”

— Edward Snowden

252. “During my stint in Geneva, whenever a CO would ask me if there was a safer, faster, and all-around more efficient way to do this, I introduced them to Tor.”

— Edward Snowden

253. “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. This was a lesson that the US government would confirm for me in other contexts, time and again, in the years ahead.”

— Edward Snowden

254. “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

255. “Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and prosecuted. Nearly every large and long-lived society is full of unwritten laws that everyone is expected to follow, along with vast libraries of written laws that no one is expected to follow, or even know about.”

— Edward Snowden

256. “America’s Founders were skilled engineers of political power, particularly attuned to the perils posed by legal subterfuge and the temptations of the presidency toward exercising monarchical authority.”

— Edward Snowden

257. “I can still feel it – the present-tense emptiness every time my call was dropped by an overloaded cell network, and the gradual realization that, cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper, even though I was in the driver’s seat, I was just a passenger.”

— Edward Snowden

258. “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

259. “NSA’s announcement of the construction of a vast new data facility in Bluffdale, Utah.”

— Edward Snowden

260. “In fact, many of the rights most cherished by citizens of democracies aren’t even provided for in law except by implication.”

— Edward Snowden

261. “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

262. “America must have a greater commitment to justice than it does simply to the law.”

— Edward Snowden

263. “What China was doing publicly to its own citizens, America might be – could be – doing secretly to the world.”

— Edward Snowden

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “I used to work for the government, but now I work for the public. It took me nearly three decades to recognize that there was a distinction, and when I did it, it got me into a bit of trouble at the office.”

— Edward Snowden

268. “The government should be afraid of the people, the people shouldn’t be afraid of the government.”

— Edward Snowden

269. “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

270. “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

271. “Please produce an autobiographical statement of no fewer than 1,000 words.”

— Edward Snowden

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “They’d call my name to tell me to wash up for dinner, but I’d pretend not to hear them.”

— Edward Snowden

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “My parents would call my name to tell me to get ready for school, but I wouldn’t hear them.”

— Edward Snowden

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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