Quotes About Surveillance

Bulk collection of phone records didn't find or stop the Tsarnaev brothers from the massacre in Boston. In fact, one might argue that all of the money spent on bulk collection takes money away from human analysts that might have noticed the older brother's trip to become radicalized in Chechnya.

There is a difference between the stuff that people put online themselves, like pictures and their trips and flights and meals they've eaten, than the stuff that they don't realize is also going into foreign computers. Like, for example, copies of your emails or every single online search you ever do, 'cause all that is being recorded as well.

I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.

Like crime, terrorism is a fact of life. I grew up in Israel, where every unattended bag was a suspected bomb; when my family moved for a few years, it was to London in the early years of 'the Troubles.'

The notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law troubles me a lot.

The U.S. intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work.

FBI wants to know everything about you, and you're not supposed to know anything about them.

This policeman came up to me with a pencil and a piece of very thin paper. He said, "I want you to trace someone for me."

If somebody's hacking you, you don't want them to know that you know.

In a democracy, the public should be asked how much security and how much privacy they want for themselves.

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.

Apparently, Ellory had been right yesterday when he told me that Chekov was a ghost—Prague, Johannesburg, Rome, Hong Kong—Alexei would materialize out of nowhere, do his work, and then disappear. But at least now, thanks to the video surveillance cameras at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, we had a photo of him.

Logan glanced at the clock on the cooker: nearly five minutes fast. The room was bathed in the pale orange glow of the overcast sky, the back garden a jungle of silhouettes and shadows through the window. He filled the kettle, then poured half of it out, before sticking it on to boil. The growing rumble drowned out the babble on his Airwave handset as DI Bell got his firearms team into place.

How can we be free when we are prisoners to social media, in a world without privacy? How can we be free when our every movement is tracked and every conversation is recorded and can easily be held against us? How exactly are we free if we are tethered to our cell phones?

Here's what we should be doing. We should be monitoring every mosque. We should be monitoring social media. We've got about three million Muslims in the United States.

Governments are scared of software.

Everything we're doing online is being not just monitored, but that information is being packaged up and sold and resold to manipulate us.

It's interesting - what are you willing to give up in terms of your privacy for access to other people? For access to things you think you desperately need. Ultimately, it's that old saying, isn't it? If the service is free, then the product is you. The thing being sold is you. There's a product for sale in you and your data.

My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.

How can we have our privacy? How can we have our independence now in these times with these cameras? Because I think privacy and our solitude is really important.

Privatization is more efficient and effective in some cases, but not in intelligence.

If I could embed a locator chip in my child right now, I know I would do that. Some people call that Big Brother; I call it being a father.

Despite habitual protests by civil servants and politicians that no such process is under way, the tortured and slow death of Internet privacy in the West, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, is a sad – albeit visible – reality and is probably inevitable.

From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads.