Quotes About Surveillance

People talk about the Patriot Act that was passed immediately in the wake of September 11. What the Patriot Act did was break down the walls between the various agencies.

The country is not a democratic state. Therefore we fear that they might carry a recorder in their pocket or there may be bugs in the walls, and you cannot be absolutely sure that you get a straight testimony.

Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.

We need to use the benefit of our law enforcement people across this country, combined with our intelligence people across this country. We need to use our technological advantages, because what we've warned of is an international guerrilla movement that threatens this country.

I do not know of a Chinese blogger who has gone to jail, but I know several who have had their blogs shut down. I also know some Chinese bloggers who have received threatening phone calls from police warning them to 'be careful.' In some cases, they stopped blogging for a while.

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them.

I never thought I'd see the day when the U.S. government could listen in on phone conversations or read private mail without first obtaining a warrant from a court. That sounds more like something that happened in the Soviet Union.

There's a lot of talk about FISA applications. Many people I've seen talk about it seem not to recognize that a FISA application is actually a warrant, just like a search warrant.

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control, but I'm a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.

President Bush has asserted the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on any American without a warrant in the name of fighting terrorism. He has asserted presidential power beyond stated constitutional rights, and there is no Republican gutsy enough to call his hand.

Whether you breach the Fourth Amendment 20 percent of the time or 100 percent of the time, it's still not the point. The point is whether or not you still collect millions of people's information with a single warrant.

At least in Russia, you cannot just go and tap into someone's phone conversation without a warrant issued by court. That's more or less the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.

With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.

How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We're supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties.

In the U.S., you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant.

Enterprising law-enforcement officers with a warrant can flick a distant switch and turn a standard mobile phone into a roving mic or eavesdrop on occupants of cars equipped with travel assistance systems.

The president overstepped his authority when he asked the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls without obtaining a warrant.

The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone's communications.

The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge.

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Smith v. Maryland that a few days' worth of phone records for a single individual were not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The NSA today, though, collects hundreds of millions of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans without an individualized warrant.

But the government spying on me was not done under the authority of a court warrant. That's why my case is even more dangerous than the others.

In order to get a FISA warrant, you need an affidavit signed by a career law enforcement officer who swears the information is true... And if it is wrong, that person is going to face consequences.

Fighting wars is not so much about killing people as it is about finding things out. The more you know, the more likely you are to win a battle.