Quotes from Glenn Greenwald

Encryption matters, and it is not just for spies and philanderers.

Courage is contagious.

Progress both in the United States and other nations was only ever achieved through the ability to challenge power and orthodoxies and to pioneer new ways of thinking and living.

I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington.

The idea that we should dismantle the core protections of our political system to erect a ubiquitous surveillance state for the sake of this risk is the height of irrationality. Yet exaggeration of the threat is repeated over and over.

Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistle-blowing, of activism, of political journalism.

Beyond collecting comprehensive data about the online activities of hundreds of millions of people, X-KEYSCORE allows any NSA analyst to search the system's databases by email address, telephone number, or identifying attributes such as an IP address.

Much of the Snowden archive revealed what can only be called economic espionage: eavesdropping and email interception aimed at the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, economic conferences in Latin America, energy companies in Venezuela and Mexico, and spying by the NSA's allies—including Canada, Norway, and Sweden—on the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy and energy companies in several other countries.

He had come to believe that the paper's concealment of that information may very well have changed the outcome of the 2004 election. "Hiding that story changed history," he said.

Emphasizing that "people make decisions for emotional reasons not rational ones," the GCHQ contends that online behavior is driven by "mirroring" ("people copy each other while in social interaction with them"), "accommodation," and "mimicry" ("adoption of specific social traits by the communicator from the other participant"). The document then lays out what it calls the "Disruption Operational Playbook.

These are people who have become convinced that they themselves are not going to be personally targeted—because they are unthreatening and compliant—and therefore either deny that it's happening, do not care, or are willing to support it outright.

In video games, one of the most helpless against injustice can even mighty.

While the NSA is officially a public agency, it has countless overlapping partnerships with private sector corporations, and many of its core functions have been outsourced.

The agency regards itself as needing no specific justification to collect any particular electronic communication,

As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article, instead of providing oversight, the Senate committee more often "treats senior intelligence officials like matinée idols.

This is the case in every society: those who pose no challenge are rarely targeted by oppressive measures, and from their perspective, they can then convince themselves that oppression does not really exist. But the true measure of a society's freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.

En nuestra vida cotidiana hay rastros que no podemos explicar y acaso sean totalmente nimios. Sin embargo, su representación mediante un dispositivo de localización... les confiere significado, lo que al parecer exige dar una cantidad tremenda de justificaciones. Esto genera ansiedades, sobre todo en las relaciones íntimas, en las que las personas quizá sientan una mayor presión para explicar cosas que simplemente no son capaces de explicar.

Radical expansions of power are often introduced in this way, by persuading people that they affect just a specific, discrete group. Governments have long convinced populations to turn a blind eye to oppressive conduct by leading citizens to believe, rightly or wrongly, that only certain marginalized people are targeted, and everyone else can acquiesce to or even support that oppression without fear that it will be applied to them.

citizens, had been targeted as well. Still, the sheer scale of diplomatic surveillance the NSA has practiced is unusual and noteworthy. In addition to foreign

Among other devices, the agency intercepts and tampers with routers and servers manufactured by Cisco to direct large amounts of Internet traffic back to the NSA's repositories.

once the citizenry acquiesces to a new power, believing that it does not affect them, it becomes institutionalized and legitimized and objection becomes impossible.

adviser, repeatedly requested that the NSA spy on the internal discussions of key member states to learn their negotiation strategies. A May 2010 SSO report

In fact, both observing and breaking the rules involve moral choices, and both courses of action reveal something important about the individuals involved. Contrary to the accepted premise-that radical dissent demonstrates a personality disorder-the opposite could be true in the face of sever injustice, a refusal to dissent is the sign of a character flaw or moral failure.

Expecting the US government to operate a massive surveillance machine in complete secrecy without falling prey to its temptations runs counter to every historical example and all available evidence about human nature.