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Quote by Edward Snowden

“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.”

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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“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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“That's the key - to maintain the garden of liberty, right? This is a generational thing that we must all do continuously. We only have the rights that we protect. It doesn't matter what we say or think we have. It's not enough to believe in something; it matters what we actually defend.”

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“When we think in the context of the last decade's infringements upon personal liberty and the last year's revelations, it's not about surveillance. It's about liberty.”

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“When people say, "I have nothing to hide," what they're saying is, "My rights don't matter."”

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“You don't need to justify your rights as a citizen - that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, "I don't need them in this context" or "I can't understand this," they are no longer rights.”

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“You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You've converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.”

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“I wonder if it's conservative or liberal [ inalienable rights idea], because when we think of liberal thought, when we think about the relation to liberty, we're talking about traditional conservatism - as opposed to today's conservatism, which no longer represents those views.”

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“One of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the [George W.] Bush administration is the increased assertion of the "state secrets" privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU - which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention - from getting their day in court.”

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“The courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen - in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case - that they have become markedly more skeptical.”

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