Quotes About Surveillance

In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens. Everywhere

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.

She had said, "Those people at the Gestapo, they know everything about a person." Mrs. Wallau had said, "That's all exaggeration. They only know what they've been told.

His few friends and his former teachers might be watched, as well as his brothers and those dearest to him. The entire city, a dragnet. And he was already in it. He had to slip though its meshes. But by now he was really done in.

Med agreed to keep an eye on Threezed, and Krish told the Free Lab sysadmin to release the mobile to him.

Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka—Lenin's secret police, the forerunner of the KGB— personally kept a little black notebook in which he scribbled down the names and addresses of random "enemies" he came across while doing his job.12

Cloud and Wallfish, Wallfish and Cloud.

Israel's secret services are allowed to profile.

This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

Nearly 75,000 Demand Progress members have urged Congress to fix the Patriot Act.

Police departments no longer have to pay overtime or divert resources from other projects to find out where an individual goes - all they have to do is place a tracking device on someone's car or ask a cell phone company for that individual's location history and the technology does the work for them.

I don't think you should have everybody's information from their bank. There should be some process: accusations and proof that you've committed a crime.

I call up Amazon. It seems to me they do a major thing wrong, right. I mean, they protect me against the loss of a $50 liability I have of something on my credit card, but they do nothing to protect me against somebody who is watching to see what books I'm interested in, what new perversions I've developed.

I thought that the AIVD was there to protect citizens like me.

Once you put in backdoors, once you allow a government to intercept anything they want, you have to give it to other governments around the world. Once you do that, there is no privacy; there is no security. There is no protection for democracy.

The question is, really, does the nonexistence of another attack prove that the programs that are in place are working?

If the area were on or near the U.S. continental shelf, such data could well provide an enemy with strategically invaluable insights into undersea access routes that could be used to attack some of the millions of Americans who live on or near our coasts.

um professor de matemática e seu aluno conversam em torno de cálices de vodca norte-vietnamita: [...] Um reacionário não anda cem metros em Cuba sem ser apanhado. E sabe quem vai pegá-lo? Eu, ele ali, aquele garçom, o motorista que está na porta, sentado à direção do carro. Quer dizer, o povo.

We don't want our government building files on what people think about their government.

During the curfew, whoever went out, the people were watching you. Any Japanese home, there was some person figuring he's a good American citizen by doing his duty, and they were watching every move each family were doin'. Or if they went out, they followed them to see where they were goin'.

Policing is an integral part of governance. It is a whole, but it is also a part of the larger whole. Just like a human organ like the head, it's got intelligence, stamina, strategy and surveillance. But it cannot function independently in the absence of other life-sustaining organs.

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances.

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.

Throughout the western world, new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that, find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.