Quotes About Surveillance

Smith v. Maryland, it held that police can obtain a list of phone numbers that a person calls, or receives calls from, without needing to get a warrant or have probable cause.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later applied this notion to say that government can monitor the email addresses a person sends to or receives from, or a list of the websites a person visits, without needing

Man, I don't want to have nothing to do with computers. I don't want the government in my business.

'1984' is terrifyingly relevant. It generates a political conversation, but it's an exciting piece of theatre. Every day, there are things to be spawned from Orwell's mind, whether it's in England or America, terrorist-related or government-related.

We have a reliable computerized network devoted to counterterrorist activities.

There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.

It's remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.

In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.

I have had to put in police reports that I have been stalked and followed.

When you look at the number of satellites, what they're doing and what they represent, it is really a vision of trying to have the world in your clutches.

In short, the hunt for bin Laden could not have been accomplished without every form of American intelligence-gathering.

I wanted to write a story about a future where everyone has a secret identity, in part because the Internet no longer exists.

Sometimes I think nobody is looking - and then there's still a picture being taken. There are just some complete idiots who follow us everywhere.

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies.

The fact you can manipulate people because you can hack them and learn everything about their personal lives - that's an immense amount of power.

I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don't realize it.

Have I been wiretapped? Yes. But who they said wiretapped me was incorrect.

I do really take it for an indisputable truth, and a truth that is one of the corner stones of political science--the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.

In Europe, it's a done deal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract is being slowly but surely replaced by a life contract inspired by Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism and the "panopticon" of his surveillance state.

After 9-11, the President had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead, by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests, President Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

[On surveillance of Americans] We're not just changing how we live, we're changing human nature itself. . . . When everything is recorded, there isn't any right and wrong for its own sake. It's just caught and uncaught.

If I was the guy, I believe, that was going to stalk anybody, it certainly wouldn't be in a building full of wrestlers.

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.