Quotes About Surveillance

If an ordinary person parks outside another ordinary person's house for a week, it's considered stalking. If, however, that person is considered newsworthy, it's perfectly legal for paparazzi to do the same thing.

I don't know if I'd want to be a Secret Service agent. In the movies, it's exciting and romantic and all that. Really, most of their job is standing in a hallway for 12 hours making sure somebody doesn't come through a doorway off of a stairwell.

My laptop seems to know where I am, even if I don't. My cellphone asks me if I want directions to anywhere from the spot I am standing in. I buy a record online and Amazon.com sends me letters, telling me that people who bought what I bought also bought these other records.

A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

For Hades is mighty in calling men to account below the earth, and with a mind that records in tablets he surveys all things.

Imagine going to book a flight and the agent politely pauses, looks up at you, and says that you are blacklisted. Your "social credit" score shows that you have been doing some things that don't sit well with the government. You are being punished, and part of the punishment is that you can't travel out of the country to visit relatives in America. You're shocked. You haven't even gotten a traffic ticket before. "There must be some mistake,

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

Once you're in a network, you can do a whole bunch of things to that network. It's just that NSA doesn't have the authority to do that.

All communication on today's networks are being monitored by government agencies and private companies.

It was a nightmare having cameras in the house 10 hours a day for a month.

We've got the NSA getting logs of every call you make. The IRS is weaponized like Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

You stuck listening devices all over the dacha--even in the bathroom. You spend the people's money to eavesdrop on my farts.

The watched watching the watcher.

When the NSA's surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden's revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.

The basic function of the FBI is not to stop crime. Rather, it functions as a political police, in large measure.

There is, in fact, a strong case to be made that a prime concern of government is the security of state power from the population. As

across the street, a few doors down, Sam watched the house, noting

Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.

The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.

Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.

Get out of here, and do your little life, but remember I'm watching you, Raymond Hessel, and I'd rather kill you than see you working a shit job for just enough money to buy cheese and watch television.

My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a king's ransom on Freon and electric power, trying to make some doomed ten bucks' worth of pretty pink flowers last one more day.

Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're

Bestenfalls ein Bewacher. Schlimmstenfalls ein Voyeur.