It's important that we elevate and primarily focus on the rights of American citizens, but it's also important that we don't forget, 95 percent of the world's population lives beyond our own borders.
Edward SnowdenRead
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
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the potential abuse of surveillance technologies by analysts in positions of power.
Edward Snowden's quote emphasizes the alarming capabilities of surveillance technologies, where anyone with the right access can monitor and wiretap virtually anyone, regardless of their status or position. This pervasive reach raises significant ethical concerns about privacy, government oversight, and individual rights in the digital age.
Themes
SurveillancePrivacyFreedomPowerTechnology
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on digital privacy rights, one might cite this quote to emphasize the dangers of unregulated surveillance.
More from Edward Snowden
All quotes →I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal.
Edward SnowdenRead
Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?
Edward SnowdenRead
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.
Edward SnowdenRead
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.
Edward SnowdenRead
I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.
Edward SnowdenRead
Similar quotes
There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.
Elon MuskRead
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
Fred BrooksRead
What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web … Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.
Tim Berners-LeeRead
It's connectivity that really makes the industrial Internet work: it's giving the right information at the right time to the right person or right machine to make the right decision.
John T. ChambersRead
The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.
Satya NadellaRead
Whatever they announce, they announce. They're in their honeymoon period, and anything they announce gets hype ... They will obviously branch out beyond Internet search, but I think the expectations won't live up to reality.
Bill GatesRead