Quotes About Surveillance

Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.

Quis costodiet ipsos custodies? (Who will watch the watchers?)

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

In the end they had lost everything, their freedom as men, their rights as men, their dignity as men, and had become nothing else but slaves of an omnipotent State, working endlessly, half-starved, half-clothed, half-sheltered in ruined buildings, endlessly spied upon, supervised, commanded by the Military and treated like dogs.

In Spain you can't do anything. If you drive, everyone recognises you; at a restaurant you have paparazzi outside.

I don't have smart speakers in the house because I have a thing about whether they are recording our conversations.

They went back there, looked at all the computers, asked me to come in and tell them what all the computers were for specifically so they knew how to dismantle the network I had been running.

If you are interacting with anything on your phone or your computer, it is specifically designed to collect as much data about you as possible, so that that can then be monetized.

Today it is becoming harder to speak out, with the inception of the Patriot Act, the president has legislated free speech to be a crime.

Even in democratic society, we don't have good answers how to balance the need for security on one hand and the protection of free speech on the other in our digital networks.

Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in a country that already knew how to watch itself. It was journalism that held the responsibility for seeing who we were and noticing what we did.

Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly.

Privacy is dead. We live in a world of instantaneous, globalised gossip. The idea that there is a 'private' sphere and a 'public' sphere for world leaders, politicians or anyone in the public eye is slowly disintegrating. The death of privacy will have a profound effect on who our leaders will be in the future.

I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don't readily advertise themselves unless they're not living in Moscow, and even then. I'm sure I've met some without realizing it.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

Even after arriving in South Korea, it's dangerous. As a North Korean defector, I need to be careful from the spies to protect my relatives inside North Korea.

Inside North Korea, we have many informants and spies watching everyone; they're paid by the government. Even a husband and wife can't trust each other.

While most of us have long understood that privacy is a fading commodity, something in human nature still expects that a phone call or email is a closed communication, and we tend to behave as though it is. That behaviour is what the electronic spies count upon, and want to preserve.

It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.

Show me the man and I'll find you the crime.

In the eyes of authority - and maybe rightly so - nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.

I am always going to have problems with the paparazzi. I have had two men outside my house for the last two years, which is frightening at times, but that is my life unfortunately.

How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?