Quotes About Surveillance

If an individual is completely isolated, but most important, completely visible, says Foucault, then power functions automatically. "[T]he surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; [ . . .] the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.

The Chinese state is the majority shareholder in the Hangzhou firm Hikvision, which began life in a state research institute and is now the largest manufacturer of video surveillance systems in the world. Today, Hikvision cameras have been installed in more than 150 countries, where they identify faces and license plates, and send an automatic alert when a driver is seen texting at the wheel.

They opt in to being tagged by their friends. That's a different thing to the police watching you at all times because you're a climate activist or a guy who goes to a mosque.

secret services arrived, I was fed up. I said, Enough already! I want my life back!

It would be a matter of concern for government if intrusive data capture has been deployed against Indian citizens or government infrastructure.

What is the government doing or not doing in terms of tracking you, following you, investigating you? And if you're suspicionless, it should be none of the above.

When I did counterintelligence investigations, they rarely saw the inside of a courtroom. That wasn't the goal of them.

When you put a camera in your kid's bedroom, you're literally inviting the entire connected world, the entire Internet into your child's safe space, if you will.

Cell-site data - like mailing addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses - are information that facilitate personal communications rather than part of the content of those communications themselves. The government's collection of business records containing these data, therefore, is not a search.

I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.

Isn't it nice of the IRS to tell the media where to ambush me before they tell me that the U.S. Attorney is suing me?

The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.

Unfortunately, it just so happened that the city-wide camera system, controlled by the police, was down that night from 12:20 AM until 12:35 AM. Seriously? Isn't that convenient… Even more convenient that at the exact same times, there was a complete radio silence on the emergency channels.

If we believe we're being watched, we're far less likely to let our minds roam toward opinions that require courage or might take us beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion. We begin to bend our opinions to please our observer.

A curious case that warmed this old ethologist's heart was that of a mathematics professor at a California university who was accused of peeing against a colleague's office door. The two male professors were said to have had a dispute that escalated to a "pissing contest." After someone had found puddles in the hallway, school officials set up a camera and captured the urinating professor on video.

The technique of beaming a ray on to window glass and reading from the vibrations the conversation going on inside had been used against the American embassy in Moscow in the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.

The notion that the lobby at Langley is choked with the corpses of former agents gunned down by their own colleagues at the behest of genocidal directors on the top floor is amusing but wholly unreal.

conspirational tradecraft

More surveillance cameras then followers lately.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who'd just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

I'm not a hallucination," J.C. snapped. "I have state-of-the-art stealthing equipment.

However much you might watch me I should be watching you more.

of a spying servant, on the other side of

That's not how national security works... I don't care what the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we the private citizens!