27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send A Chill Up

27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send A Chill Up Your Spine

By Michael, on June 10th, 2013

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/w...n2-300x300.jpgWould you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up? He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world. He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn't any privacy. He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded. Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine. Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us. But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything. Essentially, his previous life is now totally over. And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere. There is a reason why government whistleblowers are so rare. And most Americans are so apathetic that they wouldn't even give up watching their favorite television show for a single evening to do something good for society. Most Americans never even try to make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them personally. Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us. Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made will not be in vain. Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has tried to share with the world. The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine...
#1 "The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate."
#2 "...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."
#3 "The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to."
#4 "...I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
#5 "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything."
#6 "With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards."
#7 "Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere... I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President..."
#8 "To do that, the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting YOUR communications to do so."
#9 "I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians."
#10 "...they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them."
#11 "Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. ...it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life."
#12 "Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest."
#13 "Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state."
#14 "I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under."
#15 "I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."
#16 "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong."
#17 "I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act."
#18 "There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich."
#19 "The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things... And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that... because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."
#20 "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."
#21 "You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk."
#22 "I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me."
#23 "We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be."
#24 "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end."
#25 "There’s no saving me."
#26 "The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night."
#27 "I do not expect to see home again."
Would you make the same choice that Edward Snowden made? Most Americans would not. One CNN reporter says that he really admires Snowden because he has tried to get insiders to come forward with details about government spying for years, but none of them were ever willing to...

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies. I always begged them to write about it or to let me do so while protecting their identities. They refused to come forward and believed my efforts to shield them would be futile. "I don't want to lose my security clearance. Or my freedom," one told me.

And if the U.S. government has anything to say about it, Snowden is most definitely going to pay for what he has done. In fact, according to the Daily Beast, a directorate known as "the Q Group" is already hunting Snowden down...

The people who began chasing Snowden work for the Associate Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence, according to former U.S. intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity. The directorate, sometimes known as “the Q Group,” is continuing to track Snowden now that he’s outed himself as The Guardian’s source, according to the intelligence officers.

If Snowden is not already under the protection of some foreign government (such as China), it will just be a matter of time before U.S. government agents get him.
And how will they treat him once they find him? Well, one reporter overheard a group of U.S. intelligence officials talking about how Edward Snowden should be "disappeared". The following is from a Daily Mail article that was posted on Monday...

A group of intelligence officials were overheard yesterday discussing how the National Security Agency worker who leaked sensitive documents to a reporter last week should be 'disappeared.'
Foreign policy analyst and editor at large of The Atlantic, Steve Clemons, tweeted about the 'disturbing' conversation after listening in to four men who were sitting near him as he waited for a flight at Washington's Dulles airport.
'In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared recorded a bit,' he tweeted at 8:42 a.m. on Saturday.
According to Clemons, the men had been attending an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

As an American, I am deeply disturbed that the U.S. government is embarrassing itself in front of the rest of the world like this.
The fact that we are collecting trillions of pieces of information on people all over the planet is a massive embarrassment and the fact that our politicians are defending this practice now that it has been exposed is a massive embarrassment.
If the U.S. government continues to act like a Big Brother police state, then the rest of the world will eventually conclude that is exactly what we are. At that point we become the "bad guy" and we lose all credibility with the rest of the planet.

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June 10th, 2013 | Tags: Edward Snowden, Family, Freedom, Future,Government, High Paying Job, Home, Privacy, U.S. Government, U.S. Government Spying | Category: Commentary


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June 11, 2013 by William Lafferty

NSA Snooping Or Mass Roundups?

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http://cdn.freedomoutpost.com/wp-con...01-220x220.jpg The Wall Street Journal, commenting on the recent NSA snooping scandal, finds comfort in the idea that the vast amount of data collected by the NSA is not subject to abuse because it can be interpreted only by high performance computing. This data is not manipulated or misused by humans because it is intelligible only to machines. The Journal states:

“[T]he paradox of data-mining is that the more such information the government collects the less of an intrusion it is. These data sets are so large that only algorithms can understand them. The search is for trends, patterns, associations, networks. They are not in that sense invasions of individual privacy at all.” Big Brother and Big Data, Wall St Journal, June 10, 2013, A12.

Trends? Networks? No invasions of individual privacy? Edward Snowdon, the leaker, says:

“Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector. Anywhere. . . I sitting at my desk had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.” NSA Leaker Steps Forward, Tribune Review, June 10, 2013, A6.

Who has a motive to lie here, Snowdon or the NSA? Snowdon acted, he says, out of concern for the country and the belief that what the NSA was doing was seriously wrong. There is no allegation that he acted for money. In fact, because of the leak, he has lost a lucrative job and has had to flee the country. As a former CIA employee, he realizes that he may be killed, but he leaked the information anyway.

The Wall Street Journal, however, finds the NSA more credible than Snowdon and ends its editorial with this:

“What our self-styled civil libertarians should really fear is another successful terror attack like 9/11 or one with WMD. Then the political responses could include biometric national ID cards, curfews, surveillance drones over the homeland, and even mass roundups of ethnic or religious groups.” Id.

Really?

If this chilling prediction is accurate, if it’s either blanket snooping or mass roundups, has not the Journal made the case that the NSA snooping is only a preliminary security measure on a continuum that ends in a totalitarian state?

Why does the Journal find itself in the anomalous position of defending the police state activity of an agency that operates in secret with no meaningful oversight or control? Why isn’t it clear that the emperor has no clothes?

We are all subject to subtle brainwashing that occurs over time and that robs us of our common sense. What is operative in this case is the mantra we all grow up with that the police are our friends, they put their lives on the line, they stand between us and chaos, and they need all the power and leeway they can get to protect us. Above all, the police are to be trusted.

The truth is that the police are not our friends, they are not to be trusted, they take police jobs to exercise control and gain a stature they would not otherwise have, they relish the shootouts where the odds are 100 to 1, and they voraciously grab every scrap of power they can get. Beyond that, they convince the gullible that unless they get carte blanche, Western civilization is in jeopardy.

For twenty years, acting as an attorney, I read the briefs of district attorneys defending police conduct and arguing in various cases that a warrant was not needed; that the deficient affidavit in support of the warrant was not deficient; that the warrant en route was as good as one in the hand; that probable cause existed where there was only a suspicion of criminal activity, that drug sniffing dogs should be allowed to sniff any person or place at random; that police should be allowed to search cars after a stop for a minor traffic violation; and that breaking down the door rather than knocking and identifying themselves as police was reasonable in the circumstances. There was no end to police thirst for the power to operate as they pleased, the Constitution be damned.

The NSA is a police agency. It not only believes it can never have too much power, but it acts on that belief. And the Wall Street Journal, having drunk the cool aid, believes that too.


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