Edward Snowden on the right to privacy

Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

~ Edward Snowden 

Eric Snowden on his post-9/11 reaction

September 12 was the first day of a new era, which America faced with a unified resolve, strengthened by a revived sense of patriotism and the goodwill and sympathy of the world.  In retrospect, my country could have done so much with this opportunity.  It could have treated terror not as the theological phenomenon it purported to be, but as the crime it was.  It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values and cultivate resilience in the now-connected global public. 

Instead, it went to war. 

The greatest regret of my life is my reflexive, unquestioning support for that decision.  I was outraged, yes, but that was only the beginning of a process in which my heart completely defeated my rational judgment.  I accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it.  I wanted to be a liberator.  I wanted to free the oppressed.  I embraced the truth constructed for the good of the state, which in my passion I confused with the good of the country.  It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed—the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system—and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance.  The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it. 

I wanted, I think, to be part of something.  Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent about serving because it had seemed pointless, or just boring.  Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001.  In that span, which coincided with my youth, America lacked for enemies.  The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people like me—prosperous and settled.  There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online.  The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now, finally, there was a fight.

~ Eric Snowden, "9/12: The Greatest Regret of My Life," September 11, 2021

Edward Snowden on the forming of beliefs at an early age

At the age of 22, when I entered the American intelligence community, I didn't have any politics. Like most young people, I had solid convictions that I refused to accept weren't truly mine but rather a contradictory cluster of inherited principles. My mind was a mashup of the values I was raised with and the ideals I encountered online. It took me until my late twenties to finally understand that so much of what I believed—or what I thought I believed—was just youthful imprinting. We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions until we've deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we're using are our own.

~ Edward Snowden, "I Went to Work for the Government and I Found a Failed System," Reason.com, November 5, 2019