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.
I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things.
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.
Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to the government, but our futures.
I went to a website the other day and right at the top of the page it showed me my ip address. It was the most disturbing moment I have ever experienced. This website even told me what internet browser I was using, and what day it was. Computers can do anything.
We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.
When you are subverting the power of government, that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.
When people are talking about cyber weapons, digital weapons, what they really mean is a malicious program that’s used for a military purpose. A cyber weapon could be something as simple as an old virus from 1995 that just happens to still be effective if you use it for that purpose.
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.
My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.
The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.
There are proxies, proxy servers on the internet, and this is very typical for hackers to use. They create what are called proxy chains where they gain access to a number of different systems around the world, sometimes by hacking these, and they use them as sort of relay boxes.
So many of the things we’re told by the government simply aren’t true.
The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.
I’m not a spy, which is the real question.
There are times throughout history and it doesn’t take long for either an American or a German, to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the Government to do things which were not right.
I have no relationship with the Russian government at all.
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.
We are no longer citizens, we no longer have leaders. We’re subjects, and we have rulers.
If you ask anybody at Cyber Command or look at any of the job listings for openings for their positions, you’ll see that the one thing they don’t prioritize is computer network defense. It’s all about computer network attack and computer network exploitation at Cyber Command.