Quotes About Surveillance

The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so too do corporations and states.

Damien maintains, half-seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century.

When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.

He drinks the vodka. He watches television. And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters.

A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders.

totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders.

Pipes filled with brine that spied on the inhabitants of buildings watching, listening, hunting. You might obscure the attention of the Londonmancers, with the complicity of a treacherous borough, with strikebreaking hexes strong enough: but nothing could stay hidden from an inquisitive sea.

The PATRIOT Act brought down the wall separating intelligence agencies from law enforcement and other entities charged with protecting the Nation from terrorism.

It was hard enough to design chips in normal times. Doing so while battling the KGB was impossible.

It was now hard to believe how difficult it had once been to follow a person in Bangkok in a time before smart phones and social media. The new generation demanded to be followed online. It was in their digital blood. A small investment in a few specialized apps, and not even Sherlock Holmes in his most inspired opium dreams could have imagined the possibilities.

freedom of movement in 1940s Spain existed only as an exceptional political or social privilege: very few ordinary people escaped surveillance in a society in which travel anywhere required a safe conduct or pass from the authorities.

En ce sens, on pourrait dire que la nature obtient souvent elle-même des succès de caricaturiste. Dans le mouvement par lequel elle a fendu cette bouche, rétréci ce menton, gonflé cette joue, il semble qu'elle ait réussi à aller jusqu'au bout de sa grimace, trompant la surveillance modératrice d'une force plus raisonnable. Nous rions alors d'un visage qui est à lui-même pour ainsi dire, sa propre caricature.

They're doing everything they can to tighten security at the White House. Today, on the roof of the White House, they added one of those fake owls.

Here's what we know about Santa. He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good. I think he's with the NSA.

Now all of us can talk to the NSA -- just by dialing any number.

In the urgent aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, with more attacks thought to be imminent, analysts wanted to use 'contact chaining' techniques to build what the NSA describes as network graphs of people who represented potential threats.

My well-discussed 'paranoia' urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice.

Just mention the idea of warrantless wiretaps and expect to get hit up with a congressional investigation. But give somebody an avatar and a URL, and he can't tweet, post or hyperlink enough personal information about himself to as many people as possible.

It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.

If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.

We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

As many of my colleagues know, TikTok, like other Chinese companies is required under Chinese law to share information with the government and its institutions. There are real concerns that this app could also collect information on users in the United States to advance Chinese counter-intelligence efforts.

TIA was being used by real users, working on real data - foreign data. Data where privacy is not an issue.