Quotes About Surveillance

If you use a cell phone - as I do - your wireless carrier likely has records about your physical movements going back months, if not years.

What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?

Richard M. Helms, the first director of Central Intelligence to rise from the ranks, was fond of saying that the CIA had been founded to make sure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. Underlying this mission impossible was the wishful supposition that an America that knew everything could prevent anything.

There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world.

In the Age of the Almighty Computer, drones are the perfect warriors. They kill without remorse, obey without kidding around, and they never reveal the names of their masters.

The F.B.I. is about nuts and bolts. It's all about witnesses and procedure and walking the streets.

The government can spy on people using their mobile phones while they're with their wives and husbands.

My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.

As I found myself in the thick of the biggest investigative story of my career, I suffered state-backed computer hacking of my systems. Myself and my family were stalked by private security companies; my house was under surveillance.

These thieves defend themselves by saying, 'I was there all the time, and the officials missed me.' Favorite excuses for missing surveillance checkpoints: jacket covered the number took off the shirt with the number hidden in a crowd.

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

I mean, Ed Snowden was basically saying the same things that Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and other U.S. whistleblowers had said before him. But he came out more publicly, and maybe revealed more. He showed that when the U.S. government said, 'We are not surveilling U.S. citizens,' that was a lie.

Of all those in the army close to the commander none is more intimate than the secret agent; of all rewards none more liberal than those given to secret agents; of all matters none is more confidential than those relating to secret operations.

At the chinks in the drawn blinds, daylight peered like a spy.

It's like Kilroy only talking about Big Brother and there's no racism allowed.

People are so used to having their lives filmed, they're not even conscious of having cameras around. I still have that sort of suspicion when a camera comes out. I view it as a thing to fear.

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the I.R.S. all combined can't turn up a thing I got, beyond a car to drive and a seven-room house to live in.

One morning, though, I came in and found signs that my room had been entered. I knew it had been detectives. I'd heard too many times how if they couldn't find any evidence, they would plant some, where you would never find it, then they'd come back in and find it.

Every morning when I wake up, now, I regard it as having another borrowed day. In any city, wherever I go, making speeches, holding meetings of my organization, or attending to other business, black men are watching every move I make, awaiting their chance to kill me. I have said publicly many times that I know that they have their orders.

That was the original idea, but once you've got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want.

There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.

The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.

Last week they shot a woman, right about here. She was a Martha. She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb. They thought she was a man in disguise. There have been such incidents. Rita and Cora knew the woman. I heard them talking about it, in the kitchen. Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe.

There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings.