by Michael Snyder
June 10, 2013
from
TheEconomicCollapseBlog Website
Edward
Snowden
Would you be willing to give up what Edward
Snowden has given up?
He has given up his high paying job, his home,
his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose
the
monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building
to the world.
He says that he does not want to live in a world
where there isn't any privacy. He says that he does not want to live in a
world where everything that he says and does is recorded.
Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S.
government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have
never even dared to imagine. Up until now, the general public has known
very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything
about us.
But making this information public is going to
cost Edward Snowden everything. Essentially, his previous life is now totally
over.
And if the U.S. government gets their hands on
him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several
decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere. There is a reason why
government whistleblowers are so rare.
And most Americans are so apathetic that they
wouldn't even give up watching their favorite television show for a single
evening to do something good for society. Most Americans never even try to
make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them
personally.
Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart
all around us. Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made
will not be in vain. Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has
tried to share with the world.
The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden
about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine...
-
#1 - "The majority of people in developed countries spend at least
some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing
that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is
necessary and appropriate."
-
#2 - "...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."
-
#3 - "The government has
granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public
oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go
further than they are allowed to."
-
#4 - "...I can't in good
conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet
freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this
massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
-
#5 - "The NSA has built an
infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything."
-
#6 - "With this capability,
the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested
without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife's
phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails,
passwords, phone records, credit cards."
-
#7 "Any analyst at any time
can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere... I, sitting at my desk,
certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your
accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President..."
-
#8 - "To do that, the NSA
specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them
by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and
it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods
of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most
valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending
to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone
that they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting YOUR
communications to do so."
-
#9 - "I believe that when
[senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale
of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an
answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people
have been scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications
from America than we do from the Russians."
-
#10 - "...they are intent on
making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world
known to them."
-
#11 - "Even if you're not
doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded... it's
getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything
wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from
somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to
go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made,
every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on
that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life."
-
#12 - "Allowing the U.S.
government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for
revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest."
-
#13 - "Everyone everywhere
now understands how bad things have gotten - and they’re talking
about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they
are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state."
-
#14
-
"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."
-
#15 - "I don't want to live
in a world where there's no privacy, and therefore no room for
intellectual exploration and creativity."
-
#16 - "I have no intention of
hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong."
-
#17 - "I had been looking for
leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to
act."
-
#18 - "There are more
important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could
have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very
rich."
-
#19 - "The great fear that I
have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that
nothing will change. [People] won't be willing to take the risks
necessary to stand up and fight to change things... And in the
months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse. [The
NSA will] say that... because of the crisis, the dangers that we
face in the world, some new and unpredicted 'threat', we need more
authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people
can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."
-
#20 - "I will be satisfied if
the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible
executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even
for an instant."
-
#21 - "You can't come up
against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not
accept the risk."
-
#22 - "I know the media likes
to personalize political debates, and I know the government will
demonize me."
-
#23 - "We have got a CIA
station just up the road - the consulate here in Hong Kong - and I
am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a
concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that
happens to be."
-
#24 - "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."
-
#25 - "There’s no saving me."
-
#26 - "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."
-
#27 - "I do not expect to see
home again."
Would you make the same choice that Edward
Snowden made? Most Americans would not.
One CNN reporter says that he really admires Snowden because he has
tried to get insiders to come forward with details about government spying
for years, but none of them were ever willing to...
As a digital technology writer, I have had
more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital
switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted
to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be
used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.
I always begged them to write about it or to
let me do so while protecting their identities.
They refused to come forward and believed my
efforts to shield them would be futile. "I don't want to lose my
security clearance. Or my freedom," one told me.
And if the U.S. government has anything to say
about it, Snowden is most definitely going to pay for what he has done.
In fact, according to the
Daily Beast, a directorate known as "the Q Group" is already hunting
Snowden down...
The people who began chasing Snowden work
for the Associate Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence,
according to former U.S. intelligence officers who spoke on condition of
anonymity.
The directorate, sometimes known as “the Q
Group,” is continuing to track Snowden now that he’s ousted himself as
The Guardian’s source, according to the intelligence officers.
If Snowden is not already under the protection
of some foreign government (such as China), it will just be a matter of time
before U.S. government agents get him.
And how will they treat him once they find him?
Well, one reporter overheard a group of U.S. intelligence officials talking
about how Edward Snowden should be "disappeared".
The following is from a Daily
Mail article that was posted on Monday...
A group of intelligence officials were
overheard yesterday discussing how the National Security Agency worker
who leaked sensitive documents to a reporter last week should be
'disappeared.'
Foreign policy analyst and editor at large
of The Atlantic, Steve Clemons, tweeted about the 'disturbing'
conversation after listening in to four men who were sitting near him as
he waited for a flight at Washington's Dulles airport.
'In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US
intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should
be disappeared recorded a bit,' he tweeted at 8:42 a.m. on Saturday.
According to Clemons, the men had been
attending an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security
Alliance.
As an American, I am deeply disturbed that the
U.S. government is embarrassing itself in front of the rest of the world
like this.
The fact that we are collecting
trillions of pieces of information on people all over the planet is a
massive embarrassment and the fact that our politicians are defending this
practice now that it has been exposed is a massive embarrassment.
If the U.S. government continues to act like
a
Big Brother police state, then the rest of the world will
eventually conclude that is exactly what we are.
At that point we become the "bad guy" and we
lose all credibility with the rest of the planet.