Quotes About Surveillance

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more.

Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders, he was able to indulge in his hobbies... and he was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes to the wider world.

In addition to closed-circuit TV systems and the ability to track cellphone and computer users, advanced biometric identification systems and online coordination across borders are becoming more and more widespread.

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire U.S. government is forced to go through a full-body scanner.

Free speech and freedom of the press are under attack in the U.K. I cannot return to England, my country, because of my journalistic work with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and at WikiLeaks. There are things I feel I cannot even write.

My links to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden mean I am treated as a threat and can't return to the U.K.

I have a wild game camera.

Jason Bourne is supposed to be really sneaky and spry, but as soon as he walks by, everybody pulls out their cell phones and starts recording. That level of fame is wild to see.

Like any extraordinary power, surveillance provides temptations for abuse, such as tracking political opponents and journalists.

It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights.

We're not getting a good return on investment on all that money we're pumping into the intelligence community. One of the first things I would suggest is that if there's an attack and they fail to stop it or to alert us before it happens, that we ought to start cutting their budget, and for every attack they should lose ten percent of their budget.

In a democracy there will always be a tension between security and privacy.

I remember going through checkpoints as a kid. It felt normal but, looking back, of course it created tension. People standing with guns, sometimes your car getting searched and being asked where you are going. It changes the atmosphere.

If you ever watch police chases on, like, helicopter cams, they very quickly become nightmarish when you start to see the police coming in from the edge of the frame. I always find that terrifying.

You can accuse me of being a terror suspect, but I can prove to you that I'm not.

What started happening really quickly after 9/11 and the construction of this 'War on Terror' business is that I saw all kinds of parallels between the way that was being constructed and the way that prisons had been constructed since the early 1980s.

We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.

How is having every phone call that I make to my wife, to my daughter, relevant to any terror investigation?

What is our capability when someone posts a public social media posting that says that they're going to conduct attacks on the United States on behalf of the Islamic State. Why can't we pick up that information and then stop that act of terror?

Ever since 9/11, our intelligence agencies, as part of the 'war on terror,' have expanded their operations to include American citizens. I was 'terrorized' when I learned that the National Security Agency was intercepting information on Americans.

The problem of end-to-end encryption isn't just a terrorism issue.

The political solutions proposed against encryption are not going to work against terrorism.