Top 100 Nsa's Quotes
#1. Congress must go further to protect the right to privacy, to end the NSA's dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans, to make the intelligence community more transparent and accountable.
Elizabeth Warren
#2. One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.
Edward Snowden
#3. The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA's compliance record.
Barton Gellman
#4. The USA FREEDOM Act ends the NSA's unfettered data collection program once and for all, while at the same time preserving the government's ability to obtain information to track down terrorists when it has sufficient justification and support for doing so.
Ted Cruz
#5. 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;
Glenn Greenwald
#6. The NSA's vision statement is: keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing.
William Binney
#7. My well-discussed 'paranoia' urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice.
John McAfee
#8. The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.
Barton Gellman
#9. What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA's own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.
Glenn Greenwald
#10. Certain documents, such as the FISA court order allowing collection of telephone records and Obama's presidential directive to prepare offensive cyber-operations, were among the US government's most closely held secrets. Deciphering the archive and the NSA's language
Glenn Greenwald
#11. If anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Someone from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail.
Stephen Colbert
#12. Contrary to repeated claims from President Obama and the NSA, it is already clear that a substantial number of the agency's activities have nothing to do with antiterrorism efforts or even with national security.
Glenn Greenwald
#13. We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.
Edward Snowden
#14. So I think it's important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed about exactly what we're doing.
Barack Obama
#15. Let's put it this way. The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with the journalists, and they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalist, what they have, what they don't have, because encryption works.
Edward Snowden
#16. Cliff, I'd like to take over, but our charter prevents it. NSA can't engage in domestic monitoring, even if we're asked. That's prison term stuff.
Clifford Stoll
#17. The NSA?"
"Yeah, they called and offered to help out. Same software they use for enhancing spy satellite imagery."
Venkat shrugged. "It's amazing how much red tape gets cut when everyone's rooting for one man to survive.
Andy Weir
#18. Lots of data gets collected through the latest technology today, and not all of it is about people's consumer preferences.
Lisa Randall
#19. 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.
David Letterman
#20. Edward Snowden may not be a Chinese mole, but he might as well be. He's just handed Beijing a major score, while the NSA struggles to pick up the pieces - and the rest of us pay the price in terms of future national security.
Arthur L. Herman
#22. adviser, repeatedly requested that the NSA spy on the internal discussions of key member states to learn their negotiation strategies. A May 2010 SSO report
Glenn Greenwald
#23. With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.
Barack Obama
#24. The challenges posed by threats like terrorism, proliferation, and cyber attacks are not going away any time soon, and for our intelligence community to be effective over the long haul, we must maintain the trust of the American people and people around the world.
Barack Obama
#25. FBI vs. CIA
When a person works for the FBI for 20 years and retires,
he gets a watch.
When a person works for the CIA for 20 years and retires,
he gets watched.
I know this not because I'm in law enforcement or with the NSA ~
I know this because I have HBO.
Beryl Dov
#26. Those who are troubled by our existing programs are not interested in a repeat of 9/11, and those who defend these programs are not dismissive of civil liberties. The challenge is getting the details right, and that's not simple.
Barack Obama
#27. Now all of us can talk to the NSA
just by dialing any number.
David Letterman
#28. Who gets to decide who's an enemy combatant and who's an American citizen? Are we really so frightened and so easily frightened that we would give up a thousand-year history?
Rand Paul
#29. It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community.
Dianne Feinstein
#30. I was thinking about how people were upset about the information that came out from Snowden about the NSA - many people were upset, including myself. But I was kind of surprised by how little we did about it - how little fighting we did.
Maggie Gyllenhaal
#31. With all do respect, senator, I don't think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue. I'd be more than glad to come back in an appropriate setting to discuss the issues that you have raised.
Eric Holder
#32. Why did we not know that heads of state were being eavesdropped on, spied on? We are the intelligence committee and we didn't know that.
Jan Schakowsky
#33. I'm sure I've had my phone tapped for years, I don't think it's a crime against humanity they just ought to quit doing it, god damn it.
Cornel West
#34. Everybody spies on everybody, I mean, that's just a fact.
Marco Rubio
#35. Nobody ever was fired for 9/11. Instead of firing the people who didn't do a good job, we gave them medals. The guy who did a good job, I don't know what happened to him. And what we did was we decided we'd just collect everybody's information. That we'd sort of scrap the Bill of Rights.
Rand Paul
#36. I think this mass surveillance by the NSA was never about terrorism: It's all about economic spying & social control. It's all about POWER.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#37. There is no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the president is openly violating our nation's laws by authorizing the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens.
John Conyers
#38. Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.
Edward Snowden
#39. Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers that he's given, and has actively engaged in an effort to provide more information about the programs that have been revealed through the leak of classified information
Jay Carney
#40. 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.
Glenn Greenwald
#41. You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.
Edward Snowden
#42. The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or emails.
Barton Gellman
#43. You wonder why your government's completely broken? We lurch from deadline to deadline, and it's on purpose really. We do deadline to deadline because ... 'we've got to go. It's spring break, we're going to be late for spring break, and we've got to go, so we've got to finish this up before we go.'
Rand Paul
#44. It's so much easier to debate people when you can pretend that they hold moronic position that they don't actually believe.
Glenn Greenwald
#45. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apparently called President Obama directly to complain about NSA and how it spies on ordinary Americans. That's right, the guy who runs Facebook got mad at the NSA for spying on people. Talk about the pot unfriending the kettle!
Jimmy Fallon
#46. In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material, and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.
Daniel Ellsberg
#47. Accusations fit on Greenwald really sounds like he's against all surveillance unless you can find a guy with the Al Qaeda card, wearing an Al Qaeda baseball cap, an Al Qaeda uniform.
Alan Dershowitz
#48. Sales of George Orwell's 1984 have skyrocketed. It's true. So the fallout from the (NSA spying) scandal is worse than we thought. It's forcing Americans to read.
Conan O'Brien
#49. In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government - as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance - people feel powerless.
Jay Parini
#50. For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.
Barton Gellman
#51. With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.
Jay Parini
#52. I'm glad that the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country. I'm glad that activity is going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to ... Yes, I am sure that that's what they're doing.
Lindsey Graham
#53. If you were watching CNN, they were saying the NSA is listening to your phone calls. It's reading your emails. When you call your grandma in Arkansas, the NSA knows. All total bulls - t. They made the public more concerned about the privacy issue than the legitimate facts should have done.
Michael Morell
#54. The surveillance state has run amok. Technology that's enabled us to send selfies 24/7 - not that valuable - has also enabled us to be spied upon us 24/7.
Alexis Ohanian
#55. As former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, "Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody's life. If you have enough metadata you don't really need content.
Bruce Schneier
#56. Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.
Edward Snowden
#57. True. We both could. One of these days our search history is going to tip off the NSA and then we're going to be in trouble. It was a valid worry for a writer.
Chelsea M. Cameron
#58. For senators to complain that they didn't know this was happening, we had many, many meetings that have been both classified and unclassified that members have been invited to.
Harry Reid
#59. The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.
Michael Gerson
#60. The key question: will the NSA continue to monitor hundreds of millions of people without any suspicion? Under Obama's proposals: Yes.
Glenn Greenwald
#61. The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals.
Glenn Greenwald
#62. It's just simply the fact that the NSA does not think anybody should be able to communicate anywhere on the Earth without them being able to invade it.
Glenn Greenwald
#63. Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law.
Tim Weiner
#64. I don't welcome leaks. There's a reason why these programs are classified.
Barack Obama
#65. The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world.
Simon Singh
#66. The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks
Dana Perino
#67. How hard do you think it'd be to hack into the database of a major research university?"
Mac hesitated. "Since you're asking me on a cell phone, in front of God and the NSA- impossible.
Rob Thomas
#68. A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.
Richard Corliss
#69. One of the most surreal aspects of the NSA stories based on the Snowden documents is how they made even the most paranoid conspiracy theorists seem like paragons of reason and common sense.
Bruce Schneier
#70. Those of us who fought the crypto wars, as we call them, thought we had won them in the 1990s. What the Snowden documents have shown us is that instead of dropping the notion of getting backdoor government access, the NSA and FBI just kept doing it in secret.
Bruce Schneier
#71. There are programs such as the NSA paying RSA $10 million to use an insecure encryption standard by default in their products. That's making us more vulnerable not just to the snooping of our domestic agencies, but also foreign agencies.
Edward Snowden
#72. We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art. It's a basic protection.
Edward Snowden
#73. As digital communications have multiplied, and NSA capabilities with them, the agency has shifted resources from surveillance of individual targets to the acquisition of communications on a planetary scale.
Barton Gellman
#75. 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.
Edward Snowden
#76. The NSA is looking for terrorists. They're not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you. -
Jon Ronson
#77. The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.
Barton Gellman
#79. Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.
Edward Snowden
#80. What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that.
James R. Clapper
#81. We must remain mindful of the potential impact of over-correcting the authorizations of the intelligence community.
James R. Clapper
#82. I'm a strong believer in strong encryption.
Barack Obama
#83. I am not a high-tech techie, but I have been told that is not possible.
Dianne Feinstein
#84. The community of technical experts who really manage the internet, who built the internet and maintain it, are becoming increasingly concerned about the activities of agencies like the NSA or Cyber Command, because what we see is that defense is becoming less of a priority than offense.
Edward Snowden
#85. I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.
Rand Paul
#86. Look at it this way: this administration is taking unprecedented steps to make sure that the government's secrets remain private while simultaneously invading the privacy of its citizens ... Many innocents must be violated so that a few guilty people can be stopped. It's a digital stop-and-frisk ...
Charles M. Blow
#87. Well, it is a photo taken from orbit," Mindy said. "The NSA enhanced the image with the best software they have." "Wait, what?" Venkat stammered. "The NSA?" "Yeah, they called and offered to help out.
Andy Weir
#88. Well, Keith Alexander, the former director of the NSA wants to say every company in the United States falls under one of two categories, those that have been hacked and those that don't yet know it.
Ted Koppel
#89. The medium is the message, the message is encrypted, and the encryption key is controlled by NSA.
The Covert Comic
#90. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect.
Barack Obama
#91. There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.
Barton Gellman
#92. Let me ask, who died and made him king? Who gave him the authority to endanger 300 million Americans? That's not the way it works, and if he thinks he can get away with that, he's got another think coming.
John Bolton
#93. I think we've made the collection haystack so big, no one's ever getting through the haystack to find the needle. What we really need to do is isolate the haystack into a group of suspicious people and spend enormous resources looking at suspicious people, people who we have probable cause.
Rand Paul
#94. One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy.
Barack Obama
#95. There's a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s.
Barton Gellman
#96. You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.
Edward Snowden
#97. Any time someone tries to tell you that metadata is 'meaningless, don't worry, it's just who you call, it's just phone records, it's not a big deal' - realize we kill people based on metadata. So they must be pretty darn certain that they think they know something based on metadata.
Rand Paul
#98. I would argue, by the way, if the French citizens knew exactly what that was about, they would be applauding and popping Champagne corks. It's a good thing. It keeps the French safe. It keeps the U.S. safe.
Mike Rogers
#99. The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security. Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security, just so they have a better chance of keeping an eye on us.
Edward Snowden
#100. According to The Washington Post, the NSA has been monitoring phone calls and emails of people in Mexico. So apparently it's not enough to spy on American citizens, they feel they have to spy on FUTURE American citizens as well.
Jay Leno
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