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" You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk. "

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" Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it. "

" 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'm an engineer, not a politician. "

" 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. "

" I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, 'Hey, this is not appropriate.' "

" 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 do not expect to see home again, though that is what I want. "

" Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now. "

" The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists. "

" Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. "

" Being a patriot doesn't mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries. "

" If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same. "

" When people say, 'Why don't you face the music?' I say, 'You have to understand the music is not an open court and a fair trial.' "

" Sometimes the scandal is not what law was broken, but what the law allows. "

" I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression. "

" No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us. "

" If I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home. "

" I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight. "

" For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. "

" There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency. "

" The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America. "

" That's the beauty of the Internet is that we're no longer tied to our communities by physical connections. "

" What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing? "

" I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building. "

" If I had to describe myself, I wouldn't use words like 'hero.' I wouldn't use 'patriot,' and I wouldn't use 'traitor.' I'd say I'm an American and I'm a citizen, just like everyone else. "

" 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. "

" Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. "

" 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. "

" No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused. "

" 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. "