Quotes from Trevor Paglen

The private security industry feeds on itself, creating the conditions for its own growth. As unemployment rises, there's more work to be done protecting the increasingly conglomerated wealth. As guns in private hands proliferate, things happen. Blame it on gangs, and there's an argument for even more private security.

The CIA, an agency designed to operate outside the law, was now free to pursue its vision of a new world, to create new geographies, and to keep that world's details far from the public record. The black world was supercharged with newfound life and purpose.

The black world is much more than an archipelago of secret bases. It is a secret basis underlying much of the American economy.

No matter how secret a particular satellite was, it had to obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the solar system.

Spyglasses, as Lipperhey called telescopes, whether they're in the form of spotting scopes, spyplanes, or reconnaissance satellites, are more than simple instruments or tools. They beget infrastructures and geographies.

What we see strongly guides what we do: To an extent, we enact what we imagine.

Beginning in the early 1960's, history began to rhyme once again when the Department of Energy and the military began setting off nuclear weapons in the desert. Mushroom clouds lit the skies, and fallout fell like snow. The explosions were called tests, but were nonetheless full-fledged dress rehearsals for Armageddon, perhaps more. Among the desert's longtime residents, the difference between nuclear testing and nuclear war was far from self-evident.

With the geosynchronous orbit, the RAE Table maxes out. It has two answers for the orbital lifetime of a spacecraft in GSO: greater than a million years and indefinite.

How has the sky been transformed by drones? How has the ocean been transformed by the fact that over 90% of the world's information travels in underwater cables?

Engineers working in the 'black world' of classified military projects are often referred to in military circles as 'black hats.' There are a lot of jokes about the difference between 'white hats' and their spooky counterparts.

For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.

In the very near future, I guarantee that the pictures you post on social media will affect your credit rating, health and auto insurance policies, and much more. It will all happen automatically. In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures. What's at stake, obviously, is the future of the human race!

When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.

I can't imagine anything more beautiful on this planet than looking up at the stars and seeing a kind of artificial star moving through the night sky.

Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult.

The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now.

My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people - buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah.

Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of.

In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing.

I don't put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets.

Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.

Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings. Surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them.