Quotes About Surveillance

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

In America, we have bible-reading applications: every single one of those applications asks permission to turn on your microphone, your camera; it wants permission to read your e-mails and the right to send e-mails wherever it chooses.

Wherever information gathers and flows, two predators follow closely behind it: censorship and surveillance. The case of digital money is no exception. Where money becomes a series of signals, it can be censored; where money becomes information, it will inform on you.

There's some things you just have to live with. Like twelve cars camping outside your house, and when you wake up in the morning, they're going to follow you wherever you go. It helps that I live in Valencia. It eliminates some. But they're still here.

The government must give proper weight to both keeping America safe from terrorists and protecting Americans' privacy. But when Americans lack the most basic information about our domestic surveillance programs, they have no way of knowing whether we're getting that balance right. This lack of transparency is a big problem.

I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he was aware of it. And you know what they do when they become aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very vulnerable place to be? They build a decoy nest. It's just for you.

CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance.

For many, the recent disclosure of massive warrantless surveillance programs of all citizens by the Obama administration has brought back memories of George Orwell's '1984.' Another Orwell book seems more apt as the White House and its allies try to contain the scandal: 'Animal Farm.'

George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.

The Obama administration has framed its defense of the controversial bulk collection of all American phone records as necessary to prevent a future 9/11.

I think that, in the end, the military behavior and intelligence services are not very different from each other. It's an attitude of hunters; they're observing the prey.

It is not hard to see why the FBI wants wiretapping backdoors. It would certainly make its job easier. But rejiggering the Internet so government can conveniently monitor everything we say and do online is too high a price to pay for making law enforcement more efficient.

With paper printed books, you have certain freedoms. You can acquire the book anonymously by paying cash, which is the way I always buy books. I never use a credit card. I don't identify to any database when I buy books. Amazon takes away that freedom.

Prior to the passage of the Patriot Act, it was very difficult - often impossible - for us to share information with the Central Intelligence Agency, with NSA, with the other intelligence agencies, and likewise, for them to share information with us.

Privacy may actually be an anomaly.

Privacy is a thing of the past.

You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.

I don't actually believe there's any such thing as privacy.

I have as much privacy as a goldfish in a bowl.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

What you did do with your grocery card, discount card is much more invasive to your privacy than what the NSA does.

The public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up 'locational privacy.'

I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.