Quotes About Wiretaps

Has President Bush exceeded his constitutional authority or acted illegally in authorizing wiretaps without a warrant? Benjamin Franklin would not have thought so.

Long before the 2016 presidential campaign, confidential sources had alerted me to longstanding misuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system and the erosion of protections when it came obtaining permission for wiretaps and other surveillance methods.

The name of the Treasury agent Eliot Ness meant little then, but it was he who ordered wiretaps on the house as well as on Ralph's suite at the Western Hotel (as the Hawthorne had recently been renamed).

The aggressive use of wiretaps is important: It shows that we are targeting white-collar insider-trading rings with the same powerful investigative tools that have worked so successfully against the mob and drug cartels.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of unjustified wiretaps, and President John F. Kennedy conducted dubious wiretaps in the first month of his presidency.

Not only was all this collaboration conducted with no transparency, but it contradicted public statements made by Skype. ACLU technology expert Chris Soghoian said the revelations would surprise many Skype customers. "In the past, Skype made affirmative promises to users about their inability to perform wiretaps," he said. "It's hard to square Microsoft's secret collaboration with the NSA with its high-profile efforts to compete on privacy with Google.

Nixon revived the FBI's traditions of wiretaps, bugs, and black-bag jobs. They quickly became a part of the political culture of the Nixon White House. He ordered Hoover back into the field of political warfare.