You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people's Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.
America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.
When you use any kind of internet-based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war.
Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him... the better off we all are.
If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.
I have had no contact with the Chinese government. I only work with journalists.
Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.
Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law. And the key there is in terms of civil disobedience. You have to make sure that what you're risking, what you're bringing onto yourself, does not serve as a detriment to anyone else. It doesn't hurt anybody else.
The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.
Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating. But there's a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I'm no longer alone.
I do agree that when it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth.
When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.
What we've seen over the last decade is we've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.
I never chose to be in Russia, and I would prefer to be in my own country, but if I can't make it home, I will continue to work very much in the same way that I have... What happens to me is not as important; I simply serve as the mechanism of disclosure.
I did not seek to sell U.S. secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.
Even though we may focus first on the rights of our own country, that does not mean that we should disregard the rights of everyone else.
When you are in positions of privileged access... you see things that may be disturbing. Over time, that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up.
Perhaps I am naive, but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.
What does that mean for a society, for a democracy, when the people that you elect on the basis of promises can basically suborn the will of the electorate?
There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.
