Quotes About Government

Edward Snowden made an audacious claim: "I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.

Surveillance cheerleaders essentially offer only one argument in defense of mass surveillance: it is only carried out to stop terrorism and keep people safe. Indeed, invoking an external threat is a historical tactic of choice to keep the population submissive to government powers.

the Justice Department failed to "cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack.

For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other Internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the United States accused the Chinese of doing.

From its inception, FISA has been the ultimate rubber stamp. In its first twenty-four years, from 1978 to 2002, the court rejected a total of zero government applications while approving many thousands. In the subsequent decade, through 2012, the court has rejected just eleven government applications.

contrary to repeated claims from President Obama and the NSA, it is already clear that a substantial number of the agency's activities have nothing to do with antiterrorism efforts or even with national security.

US government has the capability to remotely activate cell phones and convert them into listening devices.

Certain documents, such as the FISA court order allowing collection of telephone records and Obama's presidential directive to prepare offensive cyber-operations, were among the US government's most closely held secrets. Deciphering the archive and the NSA's language

Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.

Time magazine's Jay Carney and Richard Stengel are now in government while Obama aides David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs are commentators on MSNBC.

threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech.

Since such assumptions are limited only by one's imagination and are encouraged daily by revelations of government and institutional invasion of privacy," they wrote, "the boundaries between paranoid delusions and justified cautions indeed become tenuous.

Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide.

The collect-it-all system did nothing to detect, let alone disrupt, the 2012 Boston Marathon bombing. It did not detect the attempted Christmas-day bombing of a jetliner over Detroit, or the plan to blow up Times Square, or the plot to attack the New York City subway system—all of which were stopped by alert bystanders or traditional police powers.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, they were all "doing something wrong": political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

The lesson for me was clear: national security officials do not like the light. They act abusively and thuggishly only when they believe they are safe, in the dark. Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote. *

The first was about the secret order from the FISA court compelling Verizon, one of America's largest telephone companies, to turn over to the NSA all the telephone records of all Americans.

the last story laid out the PRISM program, which I had first learned about at home in Brazil.

function is another manifestation of the public/private merger: the for-profit prison companies have, in essence, established themselves as part of the government, and laws are written by them and for their benefit. In the case of the prison industry, that's particularly

assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who "have done something wrong" should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing. *

for a thirty-day period ending in February 2013, one unit of the NSA collected more than three billion pieces of communication data from US communication systems

In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." After

according to the NSA documents, provided the agency with direct access to their servers as part of PRISM: Facebook, Google, Apple, YouTube, Skype, and the rest.

there is no check or limit on the NSA's bulk collection of metadata, thanks to the government's interpretation of the Patriot Act—an interpretation so broad that even the law's original authors were shocked to learn how it was being used.