Top 33 Katharine Gun Quotes

When you have the initial GCHQ induction course for new arrivals, they tell you… not to trust journalists, to be careful to keep everything confidential.

In any walk of life, you can choose to do the right thing.

If you are a journalist, check and double-check your sources. Don’t just swallow what politicians tell you.

Truth and accountability were drilled into me as a child.

I have only ever followed my conscience.

I mean, Ed Snowden was basically saying the same things that Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and other U.S. whistleblowers had said before him. But he came out more publicly, and maybe revealed more. He showed that when the U.S. government said, ‘We are not surveilling U.S. citizens,’ that was a lie.

I never aligned myself specifically with the anti-war movement.

I felt guilty – like, I leaked this memo, and now there’s going to be a witch hunt for the person who did it, and I’m not going to be able to deny it. That was when reality hit.

First of all, I never set out to be a whistleblower. Secondly, I never expected that my story would be interesting to anybody. Third of all, you know, I was actually terrified of being named, of being identified.

We all need to be conscious of what news we take as gospel. And we need to maybe be a little bit sceptical about what we digest.

I’ve never met Snowden, I’ve never spoken with him personally. I mean, he’s extremely smart. Very, very smart. I guess he was a lot less naive than I was.

I wouldn’t describe myself as an activist.

There was this saying in GCHQ that, if you didn’t leave after five years, you stay there for life. It was always my intention to leave before five years.

The Official Secrets Act 1989 may need reforming for the digital era, but I would argue that at its heart there should be protection for whistleblowers.

I know people have tried to make citizens’ arrests on Tony Blair and so on, but really it’s time the international criminal court has some guts and charges white war criminals. They need to face justice just like other war criminals.

We are living in an age where it’s difficult to know what the truth is and we have got politicians in charge who actually appear to not really care what the truth is.

After the initial flurry of media interest, I was left to figure out how to move on with my life – and that proved hard. I was glad to get back to what I hoped would be normality, but the effect on me had been traumatising.

Ironically, becoming known publicly was my biggest fear. And it was partly because I’m on the whole a fairly shy person.

I worked for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters, and is the equivalent of the NSA here in the U.S.

Obviously I’m not prone to leak secrets left, right and centre.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, when the focus suddenly turned toward Iraq, I suddenly thought, ‘What on earth had Iraq got to do with the war on terror?’

If a rogue nation were to attack the U.K. physically, I would be a patriot, yes; I would try to defend the U.K.

I grew up in Taiwan, which was a military dictatorship.

I was just wondering if I’d ever get a visa to go to the U.S. Probably not.

What has to be understood is that most whistle-blowers are not natural activists – this one certainly wasn’t. We usually work in anonymous jobs, far from the spotlight. We are not campaigners, or journalists, or wannabe celebrities, craving a platform. Our conscience tells us we have to reveal what we know.

The world is moving in a completely fascist, corporate direction. It worries me, it should worry us all.

Cheering crowds have never been my sort of thing.

The whole Big Brother vision of the world is looming large.

The whole issue of Iraq has left us with a legacy, which is not good. The ripple effect from that initial invasion is continually being felt in worldwide institutions, in the U.S. and the U.K.

Now everybody is questioning everything, so it’s up to journalists who really care about the truth to fight for their corner of the truth and journalistic freedom.

Working at GCHQ was a relatively easy, reliable job. As long as you always toe the ‘party line‘, you are more or less guaranteed a job for life.

I think of journalists as being bullet-proof in a way.

I did not make my disclosure about the deceitful manipulation of the U.N. before the invasion of Iraq began in order to garner fame or fortune.