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Quote by Edward Snowden

“I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.”

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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“I know that fundamentally, changes to the fabric of the internet, and sort of our methods of communication, can enforce our rights.”

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“You have to remember the way the internet works, when you communicate with the server, it's very likely not in your country. It's somewhere else in the world.”

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“By leaning on companies, by leaning on infrastructure providers, by leaning on researchers, graduate students, post-docs, even undergrads, to look at the challenges having an untrusted internet, where we have to put our communications on wires that are owned by a phone company that we can't trust, that's working in collaboration with a government that we can't trust, in areas around the world, we can restructure that communications fabric in a way that it's encrypted.”

“I think it's reasonable that the government, when it has a warrant from a court, when it's exposed to scrutiny by a legal process that would be upheld, not just nationally, but internationally as a reliable and robust standard rights protection, they can enjoy certain powers. This is no different from having the police able to get a warrant to go and search your house, to kick at your door because they think you're an arms dealer or something like that. There needs to be a process involved, it needs to be public, and it needs to be challengeable in court at all times.”

“Governments cannot require individuals, they cannot require the public as a body, and they cannot require corporations to make investigation and law enforcement easy for them in a liberal society.”

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“In liberal societies we don't typically require citizens to rearrange their activities, their lives, the way they go about their business, to make it easy for the police to do their work.”

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“When the police officers knock on your door with a warrant, they don't expect you to give them a tour. It's supposed to be an adversarial process so that it's used in these extraordinary powers are applied only when there's no alternative. Only when they're absolutely necessary, and only when they're proportionate to the threat faced by these individuals.”

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“This whole pre-criminal investigation, where we watch everybody, all the time, just in case, is really an extraordinary departure from the Western liberal tradition.”

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“We are all today being monitored in advance and in criminal suspicion. And I think that's terrifying, and deeply illiberal as concept. And that's something that we should reject.”

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“I would argue that security and liberty, security and privacy are not actually opposing. The only place those can be oppositional is in the realm of rhetoric but not fact.”

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