#1536 - Edward Snowden

You [Edward Snowden] are, in my opinion, a hero. I really think that what you exposed is hugely important for the American citizens to understand that absolute power corrupts absolutely. These people had the ability to look into everything—and they still do—you're doing, and the fact that, through these years, it literally stopped zero terrorist attacks... zero. So, this sweeping, overwhelming intrusion of your privacy had no impact whatsoever on your safety.

What they [the US government] did do was collect the records of your phone calls, and to an analyst... that's more valuable than the transcripts of your phone calls. We care less about what you said on the phone than who you called, when you called them, what else you were doing, what your phone was doing, the websites that you had access to, the cell phone towers you were connected to—all of those things. That metadata creates what's called the social graph—your pattern of life.

We are all inherently flawed. I'm a terrible person, and I think, in a lot of ways, you're not as good as you want yourself to be, but I know that I have become a better person with time ... I think we all have, and we all can—or those of us who have not could if they chose to or if they had guidance ... That is the story of human history because we were all the monkey, and then we found a stick. We could use it to beat somebody, or we could use it to build a bridge. But if you look around at the world today, there are a hell of a lot of bridges.

If you want to make America great, you want less losers. What's the best way to have less losers? Have more people with an opportunity to succeed; more people who grow up in an area where it's actually safe [and there are] economic possibilities; where you're given more access to education, more access to healthcare, more access to counseling, more access to community centers, [and] any kind of support you can possibly give people that gives them more of an opportunity to get by in life.

When we do struggle; when we do stand up; when we believe in something so strongly [that] we don't merely believe in it, but we risk something for that belief; we work together; and we pull the species forward an inch at a time. We move away from that swamp of impunity and unaccountability into a future where hey, maybe not just the little guy breaks the law and goes to jail, but maybe a senator; maybe an attorney general; maybe a president. That would be very good precedent to have.

I think there are great police officers out there ... I think most of the interactions that people have with police officers aren't horrible, but there are enough of those horrible ones that are captured on video that we have this bias towards these negative results... We don't take into account the full data set. We're not taking into account all the interactions that people have with police officers because those aren't documented.

One of the interesting things about this surveillance machine that has been built around us—the sort of architecture of repression [or] the turnkey tyranny as I describe it... So much is known about every person, regardless of how innocent or how guilty they are. It's all in there. The files are waiting to be accessed—the data just needs to be collated. It's just waiting to be requested and analyzed and used.

If Google wants to rifle through your inbox [or] if Facebook wants to go through all your direct messages and give that to the federal government, you tap one button and boom... It happens every single day.

You cannot convict Julian Assange, the chief editor and publisher of Wikileaks, under the Espionage Act without exposing the New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, whoever to the same kind of charges under this president and every coming president, and I think people don't think about that.