Quotes from Glenn Greenwald

Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.

Sono consapevole delle ritorsioni a cui mi espongo […] eppure potrò ritenermi soddisfatto nel momento in cui la commistione di leggi segrete, le grazie iniquamente distribuite e gli incontrastabili poteri esecutivi che dominano il mondo che amo verranno a galla, anche solo per un istante».

the desire for privacy is shared by us all as an essential, not ancillary, part of what it means to be human. We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.

The principle which protects personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but against publication in any form, is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate personality.

people radically change their behavior when they know they are being watched. They will strive to do that which is expected of them. They want to avoid shame and condemnation. They do so by adhering tightly to accepted social practices, by staying within imposed boundaries, avoiding action that might be seen as deviant or abnormal.

you believe you are always being watched and judged, you are not really a free individual.

What made the Internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration.

NSA has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet.

is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate. A society in which everyone knows they can be watched by the state—where the private realm is effectively eliminated—is one in which those attributes are lost, at both the societal and the individual level.

Time magazine's Jay Carney and Richard Stengel are now in government while Obama aides David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs are commentators on MSNBC.

The persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so." They would thus act as if they were always being watched, even if they weren't.

British philosopher Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century conception of the Panopticon, a building design he believed would allow institutions to effectively control human behavior.

mass surveillance kills dissent in a deeper and more important place as well: in the mind, where the individual trains him- or herself to think only in line with what is expected and demanded.

the true measure of a society's freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.

The true measurement of a person's worth isn't what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs," he said. "If you're not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real." How

threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech.

Since such assumptions are limited only by one's imagination and are encouraged daily by revelations of government and institutional invasion of privacy," they wrote, "the boundaries between paranoid delusions and justified cautions indeed become tenuous.

Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide.

The collect-it-all system did nothing to detect, let alone disrupt, the 2012 Boston Marathon bombing. It did not detect the attempted Christmas-day bombing of a jetliner over Detroit, or the plan to blow up Times Square, or the plot to attack the New York City subway system—all of which were stopped by alert bystanders or traditional police powers.

there are all sorts of things people do that they are eager to keep private, even though these sorts of things do not constitute doing "something wrong." Privacy is indispensable to a wide range of human activities.

A prime justification for surveillance—that it's for the benefit of the population—relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are "doing something wrong," and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy.

what goals drive all institutions of authority. "Doing something wrong," in the eyes of such institutions, encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behavior, and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.

Years earlier, I might have scoffed, but I'd come to accept that, for Snowden's generation, they played no less serious a role in molding political consciousness, moral reasoning, and an understanding of one's place in the world than literature, television, and film. They, too, often present complex moral dilemmas and provoke contemplation, especially for people beginning to question what they've been taught.

La transparencia es para quienes tienen obligaciones públicas y ejercen el poder público. La privacidad es para todos los demás.