Quotes About Surveillance

you believe you are always being watched and judged, you are not really a free individual.

NSA has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet.

is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate. A society in which everyone knows they can be watched by the state—where the private realm is effectively eliminated—is one in which those attributes are lost, at both the societal and the individual level.

The persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so." They would thus act as if they were always being watched, even if they weren't.

British philosopher Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century conception of the Panopticon, a building design he believed would allow institutions to effectively control human behavior.

mass surveillance kills dissent in a deeper and more important place as well: in the mind, where the individual trains him- or herself to think only in line with what is expected and demanded.

threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech.

Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide.

The collect-it-all system did nothing to detect, let alone disrupt, the 2012 Boston Marathon bombing. It did not detect the attempted Christmas-day bombing of a jetliner over Detroit, or the plan to blow up Times Square, or the plot to attack the New York City subway system—all of which were stopped by alert bystanders or traditional police powers.

A prime justification for surveillance—that it's for the benefit of the population—relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are "doing something wrong," and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, they were all "doing something wrong": political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who "have done something wrong" should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.

The hacking practice is quite widespread in its own right: one NSA document indicates that the agency has succeeded in infecting at least fifty thousand individual computers with a type of malware called "Quantum Insertion." One map shows the places where such operations have been performed and the number of successful insertions:

Technology has now enabled a type of ubiquitous surveillance that had previously been the province of only the most imaginative science fiction writers.

I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.

I do not want to live in a world where we have no privacy and no freedom, where the unique value of the Internet is snuffed out,

knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.

The first was about the secret order from the FISA court compelling Verizon, one of America's largest telephone companies, to turn over to the NSA all the telephone records of all Americans.

The second covered the history of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, based on a top secret 2009 internal report from the NSA's inspector general; another detailed the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program that I had read about on the plane;

the last story laid out the PRISM program, which I had first learned about at home in Brazil.

assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who "have done something wrong" should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing. *

I realized," he said, "that they were building a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally. To make it so that no one could communicate electronically without the NSA being able to collect, store, and analyze the communication.

for a thirty-day period ending in February 2013, one unit of the NSA collected more than three billion pieces of communication data from US communication systems

The ability to eavesdrop on people's communications vests immense power in those who do it. And unless such power is held in check by rigorous oversight and accountability, it is almost certain to be abused.