Quotes About Government

One of the most surreal aspects of the NSA stories based on the Snowden documents is how they made even the most paranoid conspiracy theorists seem like paragons of reason and common sense.

In 2014, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden remarked, "We kill people based on metadata.

Those of us who fought the crypto wars, as we call them, thought we had won them in the 1990s. What the Snowden documents have shown us is that instead of dropping the notion of getting backdoor government access, the NSA and FBI just kept doing it in secret.

former NSA director Michael Hayden: "Give me the box you will allow me to operate in. I'm going to play to the very edges of that box. . . . You, the American people, through your elected representatives, give me the field of play and I will play very aggressively in it.

The world now knows that US telcos give the NSA access to the Internet backbone and that US cloud providers give it access to user accounts.

483,000 government contractors hold top-secret clearances: a third of the 1.4 million people cleared at that level.

For example, we know that the US government convinced Skype—through bribery, coercion, threat, or legal compulsion—to make changes in how the program operates, to facilitate eavesdropping.

Already law enforcement agencies make use of predictive analytic tools to identify suspects and direct investigations. It's a short step from there to the world of Big Brother and thoughtcrime.

But when it comes to governments, unhappy as I am to say it, I would rather be eavesdropped on by the US government than by many other regimes.

US law requires financial institutions to report cash transactions of $10,000 or larger to the government; for currency exchangers, the threshold is $1,000.

Given current laws, trust is our only option.

NSA analyst touches something in the database,

Government involvement, whether in the form of regulation, liabilities, or direct funding, isn't a panacea, but neither is its absence.

Even Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the person who wrote the USA PATRIOT Act, was surprised when he learned that the NSA used it as a legal justification for collecting mass-surveillance data on Americans. "It's like scooping up the entire ocean to guarantee you catch a fish," he said.

Keeping the fear stoked is big business. Those in the intelligence community know it's the basis of their influence and power. And government contractors know it's where the money for their contracts comes from. Writer

Verizon, for example, reports that it received 320,000 "law enforcement demands" for data in 2013. We know that every three months Verizon is served with a single National Security Letter that requires it to turn over the metadata of all 290 million of its customers, so what does that 320,000.

There is strength in numbers, and if the public outcry grows, governments and corporations will be forced to respond. We are trying to prevent an authoritarian government like the one portrayed in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a corporate-ruled state like the ones portrayed in countless dystopian cyberpunk science fiction novels. We are nowhere near either of those endpoints, but the train is moving in both those directions, and we need to apply the brakes.

More members of Congress must commit to meaningful NSA reform. We need comprehensive strategic oversight by independent government agencies, based on full transparency. We need meaningful rules for minimizing data gathered and stored about Americans, rules that require NSA to delete data to which it should not have access.

In the 1970s, the Church Committee investigated intelligence gathering by the NSA, CIA, and FBI. It was able to reform these agencies only after extensive research and discovery. We need a similar committee now. We need to convince President Obama to adopt the recommendations of his own NSA review group. And we need to give the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board real investigative powers.

Governments almost never admit to hacking each other's computers. Researchers generally infer the country of origin from the target list.

You're too straight, you just don't understand these guys' priorities. They don't expect any law or justice from the U.S. government. They don't even expect the government to be sane. The whole federal system just detached itself from them and floated off into deep space. They think of the government as something like bad weather . It's something you just endure.

They can't strike against smugglers! We're not the government. We are a criminal private-enterprise operation!

You see, I'm from your government, and I'm here to help you.

The cliques formed a shadow government in C-K, a moral parallel to the distracted formal rule of the Queen's Advisors. Clique elites moved behind the scenes, imitating their paragon Wellspring in deliberate webs of self-spun obfuscation. The forms of power and its realities had been gently disentangled.