Quotes About Surveillance

In a wired world, silence is suspicious.

To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country.

In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything.

After almost exactly three hours, we rolled into a small hole of a town that had one traffic light and a resturant simply marked DINER. There hadn't been any traffic on the road for over an hour, though, which was really the most important thing. We hadn't been followed. Sydney drove us to a building with a sign that read MOTEL. Apparently this town liked to stick to the basics when it came to names. I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually just called TOWN.

we rolled into a small hole of a town that had one traffic light and a restaurant simply marked DINER. There hadn't been any traffic on the road for over an hour, though, which was really the most important thing. We hadn't been followed. Sydney drove us to a building with a sign that read MOTEL. Apparently, this town liked to stick to the basics when it came to names. I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually just called TOWN.

You mean it?" I asked. "Adrian and I are free? No one spying on us or looking over our shoulder?" My dad's jaw dropped. "As free as anyone is in this world," she said ruefully. "Honestly, I think it was a relief to some of them. You're an awful lot of trouble, Sydney Ivashkov.

Tell me immediately who those people are in that glass capsule!' 'Ah-ha,' said the Chief Spy, twirling his false moustache.

A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy…or at best protects her privacy only with great effort and much chicanery. Besides that, do you ever know what the computer network is doing when you poke your card into a slot? I don't. I feel much safer with cash. I've never heard of anyone who had much luck arguing with a computer.

As for the tank, not only is it unAmerican and probably subversive to eat without watching stereo but also the racket from it would interfere even with a directional mike aimed at us from a distance . . .

In brief, once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a secret police of order n plus 1 must be created. And so on, forever.

In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out.

National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the logically Empedoclean infinite regress it requires for perfect "security." In that gap between the ideal of "One Nation under surveillance with wire taps and urine tests for all," and the strictly limited real situation of finite resources and finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish, both among the citizens and among the police.

In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game — even as victim, or citizen being monitored — will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.

The agent knows who he is spying on, but he never knows who is spying on him. Could it be his wife, his mistress, his secretary, the newsboy, the Good Humor man?

For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.

Hawk and I lay behind the rock

So Pike and his guys set up, dug in, and waited, night-vision goggles, commo buds in their ears, weapons locked and hot, good to go.

I watched the mirror for black sedans as we pulled away, and checked every side street as we drove to the freeway. I looked for their big black beast as we climbed the ramp, and kept looking, even after the freeway swallowed us, a buffalo joining a herd, one hiding among the many, and finally safe.

Scott parked in plain view by a gnarled podocarpus tree, nose to nose with the Jeep. He tucked the suspect sketch into his pocket, got out, and went to the edge of the slope. Cole and his buddies were watching him like three crows on a fence. A rumpled black cat with a crooked ear was watching him, too. The cat's eyes were hateful. Cole

Video cams set up on a little platform at the rear of a place that might be called a grand ballroom if you thought small.

Pike stepped into the first bay and spotted the man from the Monte Carlo in an office at the rear of the building. He was in front of a television with his back to the door. The Dodgers were playing a day game. Pike checked to see that the other two men were still struggling with the fender, then slipped toward the office as silently as a fish gliding through water. On

The lifter didn't seem to be paying a lot of attention, but the buzz cut was looking at everything. He scanned the storefronts and alleys and rooflines, his ice blue eyes moving in an unhurried, practiced sweep. I wondered what he was looking for, and I wondered where he had picked up the habit. I said, "Afghanistan." The ice blue eyes never stopped their search.

Pike unscrewed the interior light so it wouldn't come on, then left the car. It was full-on dark now, and Pike enjoyed the darkness. Darkness, rain, snow, a storm—anything that hid you was good. He circled the house to check the windows, then slipped back onto the porch and let himself in.

Pike made the Corolla for an early '90s model. It was dark brown in color with mismatched wheels and rusty acne on the trunk. Pike copied the plate number. He stayed between three and four cars behind, only tightening up when the Corolla beat him through an intersection and traffic began to slow.