Quotes About Surveillance

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.

Remember: if you can see the Empire State Building, The Empire State Building can see you.

old Google Glass monitored what people watched; now Google Everywhere monitors what they think. Although Glass came to know Scoble better than even his spouse, Everywhere knows him better than he knows himself.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it. Scott McNealy, co-founder, Sun Microsystems

Overhead, a Hawk was zeroing in on a watchbird. The armored murder machine had learned a lot in a few days. Its sole function was to kill. At present it was impelled toward a certain type of living organism, metallic like itself. But the Hawk had just discovered that there were other types of living organisms, too— Which had to be murdered.

This may be the great Achilles' heel of the Internet under capitalism: the money comes from surreptitiously violating any known understanding of privacy.

Hand still on her holster, she tucked herself beside the ice coolers and peered through the open door.

There are German soldiers on every corner.

Haroche was crouched to the left of his old comconsole desk, just levering the vent grille out of the wall. In the opened flimsie-folder on the floor by his side lay another fiber filter. Miles laid a small bet with himself that they would find a disemboweled grille awaiting Haroche's return in one of the briefing rooms on a direct line between Illyan's old office and this one. A quick switch, very cool. You think fast, General. But this time I had a head start.

Me, I got patted down! I felt rather flattered that he thought I could have an AK-47 concealed in my pants leg or a bomb strapped to my Wal-Mart bra.

Didn't the secret police know the exact aroma and chemical composition of every subversive fart in Greece?

I watched him long, and he seemed to be following you as if to guard and yet not be seen himself...

The following morning, when I met for breakfast with the staff, we kept noisy music playing loudly on a tape recorder as a precaution against hidden microphones. It was a good thing we did: Later, we found five listening devices hidden in our rooms in the guesthouse. One staffer unscrewed a plate over the light switch in his room, discovered a bug, removed it, and took it home as a souvenir.

To adduce proof that the husky, straw-hatted young man in gabardine who tailed me the whole next month was an F.B.I. operative is impossible, nor can I swear that my mail was fluoroscoped during that period. I do know that for a while I underwent all the tremors of a Graham Greene character on the run, even if it had no purificatory effect on my religious views. When

A camera requires law, order, the thin blue line.

the age of information, my dear," my mother said with justifiable pride when they had done their work at their computers, "everyone's garbage is on display for all to see, and all you need to know is how to look.

The Patriot Act is essential to our continued success in the war on terror here at home.

the walls have ears, but they don't have tongues.

The truth is creepier. It's not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It's that their model of you is so accurate that it's making predictions about you that you think are magic.

I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can't focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can't pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won't be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention.

whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it's always to improve the voodoo doll. Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap as $30 (£22), far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home.

The internet arrived for most of us in the late 1990s, into a society where the middle class was starting to crumble and where financial insecurity was rising, and we were sleeping an hour less than people did in 1945. It would always have been hard to resist the sophisticated human-hacking of surveillance capitalism, but it appeared we were already getting weaker, and we were easier to hack than we would have been otherwise.

The quality of life decreases with heightened security.

[Adolf Hitler] was always intensely worried about security and people watching or being nosy, intruding on his private life.