Quotes About Surveillance

The world now knows that US telcos give the NSA access to the Internet backbone and that US cloud providers give it access to user accounts.

The most insidious RATs can turn your computer's camera on without turning the indicator light on. Not all ratters extort their victims; some just trade photos, videos, and files with each other.

Retail store surveillance systems register our presence, even if we are doing nothing but browsing and even if we pay for everything in cash.

Post-9/11 surveillance has caused writers to self-censor. They avoid writing about and researching certain subjects; they're careful about communicating with sources, colleagues, or friends abroad.

A 2010 investigation found that 1,931 different corporations are working on intelligence, counterterrorism, or homeland security inside the US.

For example, we know that the US government convinced Skype—through bribery, coercion, threat, or legal compulsion—to make changes in how the program operates, to facilitate eavesdropping.

Already law enforcement agencies make use of predictive analytic tools to identify suspects and direct investigations. It's a short step from there to the world of Big Brother and thoughtcrime.

The UK company Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a "blind" call to a phone—one that doesn't ring, and isn't detectable. The blind call forces the phone to transmit on a certain frequency, allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter.

But when it comes to governments, unhappy as I am to say it, I would rather be eavesdropped on by the US government than by many other regimes.

Two of the NSA's internal databases, code-named HAPPYFOOT and FASCIA, contain comprehensive location information of devices worldwide. The NSA uses the databases to track people's movements, identify people who associate with people of interest, and target drone strikes.

The bargain you make, again and again, with various companies is surveillance in exchange for free service.

our personal information is being bought and sold without our knowledge and consent.

Snowden put it like this in an online Q&A in 2013: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

Surveillance is the business model of the Internet for two primary reasons: people like free, and people like convenient.

Data is the exhaust of the information age.

But eavesdropping acquired a new, and more intense, life after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. "Never again" was an impossible mandate, of course, but the only way to have any hope of preventing something from happening is to know everything that is happening. That led the NSA to put the entire planet under surveillance.

NSA analyst touches something in the database,

The overwhelming bulk of surveillance is corporate, and it occurs because we ostensibly agree to it. I don't mean that we make an informed decision agreeing to it; instead, we accept it either because we get value from the service or because we are offered a package deal that includes surveillance and don't have any real choice in the matter.

SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM CONTINUES TO DRIVE THE INTERNET

There's a strong physiological basis for privacy. Biologist Peter Watts makes the point that a desire for privacy is innate: mammals in particular don't respond well to surveillance. We consider it a physical threat, because animals in the natural world are surveilled by predators. Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators.

Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, and technologists have all written about the effects of constant surveillance. Studies show that we are less healthy, both physically and emotionally. We have feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Surveillance strips us of our dignity. It threatens our very selves as individuals. It's a dehumanizing tactic employed in prisons and detention camps around the world.

Our privacy is under assault from constant surveillance. Understanding how this occurs is critical to understanding what's at stake.

Because we all use the same products, technologies, protocols, and standards, we either make it easier for everyone to spy on everyone, or harder for anyone to spy on anyone.

Even Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the person who wrote the USA PATRIOT Act, was surprised when he learned that the NSA used it as a legal justification for collecting mass-surveillance data on Americans. "It's like scooping up the entire ocean to guarantee you catch a fish," he said.