Quotes About Government

I found the sheer vastness of the spying system genuinely shocking, all the more so because it had clearly been implemented with virtually no accountability, no transparency, and no limits. The

Another BOUNDLESS INFORMANT document detailed the international data collected in a single thirty-day period from Germany (500 million), Brazil (2.3 billion), and India (13.5 billion). And yet other files showed collection of metadata in cooperation with the governments of France (70 million), Spain (60 million), Italy (47 million), the Netherlands (1.8 million), Norway (33 million), and Denmark (23 million).

Most remarkably, Americans now considered the danger of surveillance of greater concern than the danger of terrorism:

the NSA databases "store information about your political views, your medical history, your intimate relationships and your activities online." The agency claims this personal information won't be abused, "but these documents show that the NSA probably defines 'abuse' very narrowly.

I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington.

Beyond collecting comprehensive data about the online activities of hundreds of millions of people, X-KEYSCORE allows any NSA analyst to search the system's databases by email address, telephone number, or identifying attributes such as an IP address.

While the NSA is officially a public agency, it has countless overlapping partnerships with private sector corporations, and many of its core functions have been outsourced.

The agency regards itself as needing no specific justification to collect any particular electronic communication,

Radical expansions of power are often introduced in this way, by persuading people that they affect just a specific, discrete group. Governments have long convinced populations to turn a blind eye to oppressive conduct by leading citizens to believe, rightly or wrongly, that only certain marginalized people are targeted, and everyone else can acquiesce to or even support that oppression without fear that it will be applied to them.

Among other devices, the agency intercepts and tampers with routers and servers manufactured by Cisco to direct large amounts of Internet traffic back to the NSA's repositories.

adviser, repeatedly requested that the NSA spy on the internal discussions of key member states to learn their negotiation strategies. A May 2010 SSO report

Expecting the US government to operate a massive surveillance machine in complete secrecy without falling prey to its temptations runs counter to every historical example and all available evidence about human nature.

Equally nonsensical was the notion that Snowden would try to save himself by giving away surveillance secrets. He had dismantled his life and risked a future in prison to tell the world about a clandestine surveillance system he believed must be stopped.

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

More remarkable is the fact that in country after country, revelations that the NSA was spying on hundreds of millions of their citizens produced little more than muted objections from their political leadership. True indignation came gushing forward only once those leaders understood that they, and not just their citizens, had been targeted as well.

To be German is simply the way we live; it is a love of government and orderliness, for one thing, and confidence in ourselves and in each other.

no man is above the law and that includes the president of the United States

The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.

the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then

Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.

They knew that in the 1970s the Indian Health Service of the U.S. government admitted that thousands of Native women had been sterilized without their informed consent. Some called it a long-term strategy for taking over Indian lands, and others said it was the same racism that had sterilized black women in the South.

In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just "given" the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy.

that conflict follows politics as night follows day