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Quote by Edward Snowden

“Many of our ally states don't have these constitutional protections - in the UK, in New Zealand, in Australia. They've lost the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. All of those countries, in the wake of these surveillance revelations, rushed through laws that were basically ghostwritten by the National Security Agency to enable mass surveillance without court oversight, without all of the standard checks and balances that one would expect.”

Quote by Edward Snowden

Author

Edward Snowden, born on June 21, 1983, is a system administrator. He is renowned for his disclosure of the global surveillance programs of the United States National Security Agency (NSA). In 2013, he leaked a large number of documents about these programs, which sparked widespread international attention. more

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“Microsoft is in a court battle with the Department of Justice. The DOJ is saying, "We want information from your data center in Ireland. It's not about a US citizen, but we want it." Microsoft said, "OK, fine. Go to a judge in Ireland. Ask them for a warrant. We have a mutual legal-assistance treaty. They'll do it. Give that to us, and we'll provide the information to you in accordance with Irish laws."”

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“If we allow the United States to set the precedent that national borders don't matter when it comes to the protection of people's information, other countries are watching. They're paying attention to our examples and what is normative behavior in terms of dealing with digital information.”

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“[Brazil] went to the UN and said, "We need new standards for this." We need to take a look at what they're calling "data sovereignty."”

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“Russia recently passed a law - I think a terrible law - which says you have to store all of the data from Russian citizens on Russian soil just to prevent other countries from playing the same kind of legal games we're playing in this Microsoft case.”

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“[Sovereignty] would break the American monopoly, but it would also break Internet business, because you'd have to have a data center in every country. And data centers are tremendously expensive, a big capital investment.”

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“When we talk about the assertion of basically new government privileges with weak or no justification, we don't even have to look at international law to see the failings in them.”

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“When we look at how, constitutionally, only Congress can declare war, and that is routinely ignored. Not NATO or the UN, but Congress has to authorize these endless wars, and it isn't.”

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“The [George W.] Bush administration marked a very serious and profoundly negative turning point - not just for the nation, but for the international order, because we started to govern on the idea of "might makes right." And that's a very old, toxic and infectious idea.”

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“Richard Nixon got kicked out of Washington for tapping one hotel suite. Today we're tapping every American citizen in the country, and no one has been put on trial for it or even investigated. We don't even have an inquiry into it.”

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