A Quote by Michael Morell
ISIS went to school on how we were collecting intelligence on terrorist organizations by using telecommunications technologies. And when they learned that from the [Edward] Snowden disclosures, they were able to adapt to it and essentially go silent.
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We don't stand here alone, it's possible through the great organisations that support us. The disclosures that Edward Snowden revealed aren't only a threat to privacy but to democracy, when the most important decisions made affect all of us. Thank you to Edward Snowden. I share this with Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who are exposing truth.
Let us not compare Edward Snowden's situation with that of Chelsea Manning or Jeremy Hammond, who is also imprisoned in the United States. As a result of WikiLeaks' hard work, Edward Snowden has political asylum, has travel documents, lives with his girlfriend, goes to the ballet and earns substantial speaking fees. Edward Snowden is essentially free and happy. That is no coincidence. It was my strategy to undo the chilling effect of the 35 year Manning sentence and it has worked.
Companies made these decisions about encryption when they were finding it very difficult to sell their products overseas because the [Edward] Snowden disclosures created the impression that the U.S. government was inside this hardware and software produced by them. They needed to do something to deal with the perception.
The real art of what we do, at least back in the old-school days, was improv. If you were a great worker, you were able to adapt and that skill developed over time because of all the traveling and working in different areas. You learned how to read a crowd.
The [Edward] Snowden disclosures created this perception that people's privacy was being put at significant risk.
ISIS is a learning enemy, and former Deputy Director of NSA Chris Inglis says that they have gone to school on the documents released by Edward Snowden and have changed their communications practices.
Do I believe Edward Snowden contributed to the rise of ISIS? Yes. Would they have gotten there without the help he provided them? Probably. Would they have been able to conduct this attack in Paris without him? Maybe. So the honest answer is I don't know.
Organizational Development: The New Christian Right of the 1980s was dominated by paper organizations that were essentially the mailing lists of a handful of politicized ministers. Such organizations were better at issuing press releases than doing the hard work of political mobilization and advocacy. By contrast, the movement of the 1990s has generated a plethora of grass-roots organizations that allocate meaningful responsibilities to individual members. The goal is to create an army of grassroots activists who know how to stimulate political change.
We know that if al Queda or one of these terrorist organizations were to get a weapon of mass destruction from Iraq, that they would have no hesitation about using it to catastrophic consequences; the potential is for hundreds of thousands of casualties.
[Edward Snowden and his team] they're great characters. They're fascinating people. They were in an extraordinary situation.
I had to deal with terrorist finance. And we had to, if you like, ensure that the accounts of people who were guilty of terrorist finance or using their accounts for terrorist finance were closed down. So we had to do asset freezing.
It was always remarkable to me how ignorant the labels were of the listening habits of their own customers, and how obstinate they were in denying those habits and then trying to essentially alter those habits instead of retooling their business to adapt to them.
Snowden has presented us with choices on how we want to move forward into the future. We're at a crossroads and we still don't quite know which path we're going to take. Without Snowden, just about everyone would still be in the dark about the amount of information the government is collecting. I think that Snowden has changed consciousness about the dangers of surveillance.
We can no longer expect an Intelligence Community that is mostly male and mostly white to be able to monitor and infiltrate suspicious organizations or terrorist groups.
Trying to use all the existing technologies that were out there wouldn't work for us because none of them were flexible. Everything was rigid in some way, so we had to go on a manhunt, essentially for something that was a viable technology. So it was a good four-months of just designing and figuring out the lights.
The situation they [journalists and Edward Snowden] were in was incredibly heightened. The stakes were high. There was a lot of pressure, a lot of tension, a lot of sense of claustrophobic, clandestine energy that I think was exhilarating for us to explore and recreate. We were fortunate to shoot a fair amount of our stuff at the actual hotel where it all happened in Hong Kong. That added another element of very similitude to the situation, so I feel like it was exciting.
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