Quotes About Surveillance

The Deliverator had to borrow some money to pay for it. Had to borrow it from the Mafia, in fact. So he's in their database now—retinal patterns, DNA, voice graph, fingerprints, footprints, palm prints, wrist prints, every fucking part of the body that had wrinkles on it—almost—those bastards rolled in ink and made a print and digitized it into their computer.

There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view he's looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.

The FBI hates and fears strong crypto.

There had been no drones shadowing him in Canada, but apparently the United States was a different story. It was, as all the world knew, a completely insane and out-of-hand country, unable to control itself.

They are running a secure operating system you've never heard of," he explained. "It's called Shiny Hat." "Shiny Hat." "Yes. The most clinically paranoid operating system in the world. Since you have an overdeveloped sense of irony, Stokes, you might like to know that we acquired it from hackers who were specifically worried about being eavesdropped on by shadowy government entities. Now they work for us.

He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle of the greatest war in history—in a country run by belligerent Fascists for God's sake—two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five-dollar tarps. Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this?

bimbo boxes with license plates from all the Burbclaves.

Van Eck phreaking

You can always tell a police state, or a country at war, by how government vehicles move

When they send someone to interrupt a private conversation, it means that they weren't able to eavesdrop.

I was much less paranoid now that I discovered there really were people following me, and wanting to kill me. This was a big relief.

I never realized the Department of Agriculture was involved in national security. Do you have, like, undercover cows?

Facebook knows almost everything about their lives, their families and their friends . . . It is also a platform built on exhibitionism and voyeurism, where users edit themselves to exhibit a more flattering side and they quietly spy on their friends.

We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state… Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses.

With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as 'the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state'. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God's gift to eavesdroppers.

on Facebook 'the user is the product

A system of cameras and censors are used along the border and interior to help detect the movement of illegal immigrants crossing through the dense brush.

Many of America's policing techniques, including widespread surveillance, were pioneered and perfected in American colonies such as the Philippines before being introduced to police departments in the United States. Blacks in the South had to be controlled. Labor unions and radical socialists had to be broken.

Soviet spies were among the best in the business, but the semiconductor production process required more details and knowledge than even the most capable agent could steal.

You already have zero privacy. Get over it! --Scott McNealy CEO Sun Microsystems 1999

If J. Edgar Hoover had something like Total Information Awareness, would his agents have used it, as they did all the other means available to them, to harass civil rights activists, reds, poor people's organizations, unionists, & peaceniks? Most certainly!

There are plenty of officers infiltrating the protestors and making lists of contacts

In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.