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
The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.
Interpretation
The NSA has the capability to collect a vast amount of private communications without specific targeting.
This quote by Edward Snowden highlights the extensive surveillance capabilities of the NSA, suggesting that the agency's infrastructure is designed to indiscriminately gather personal data. It raises important concerns about privacy and the potential for abuse of power by government agencies, emphasizing the ease with which personal information can be accessed without consent or oversight.
In practice
Discussing the importance of privacy in a technology conference.
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.
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.
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?
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.
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.
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.
There are two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those who don't know they have been hacked.
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.
When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.
There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.
There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only is it creative, but it's incredibly absorbing.
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