Quotes About Government Privacy

#1. Despite being in public life, I value my own privacy immensely and would be as concerned as anyone else if I thought my mobile phone records could be easily available to officials across government.

David Blunkett

#2. It is my belief that industry and government around the world should work even more closely to protect the privacy and security of Internet users, and promote the exchange of ideas, while respecting legitimate government considerations.

Bill Gates

#3. Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [ ... ] and the like.

William O. Douglas

#4. Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures.

Edward Snowden

#5. The US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide.

Anonymous

#6. We have never really had absolute privacy with our records or our electronic communications - government agencies have always been able to gain access with appropriate court orders.

Dorothy Denning

#7. The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

John Updike

#8. You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else's mail is a felony but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#9. This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.

Nick Harkaway

#10. The U.S. Constitution protects our privacy from the prying eyes of government. It does not, however, protect us from the prying eyes of companies and corporations.

Simon Sinek

#11. The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.

Glenn Greenwald

#12. I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.

Evgeny Morozov

#13. No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.

Stephen King

#14. I'd like to do a song that I wrote today about our government's increasing infringement on our right to privacy, but the lyrics mysteriously disappeared from my guitar case.

Dan Piraro

#15. We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded.

Rebecca Solnit

#16. We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
[Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 341 (1966) (dissenting)]

William O. Douglas

#17. I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card.

Ron Paul

#18. When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

Al Franken

#19. Encryption ... is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government ... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

Esther Dyson

#20. I support safeguarding users' personally identifiable information and sensitive data like health or financial records. I also believe the government has a responsibility to punish deceptive and unfair practices that defy reasonable expectations about consumers' privacy.

Marsha Blackburn

#21. I think that [there is] this fundamental right to privacy and the philosophy that government shouldn't be intrusive.

Tim Cook

#22. We need to protect the privacy rights of all Americans, and that means stopping the federal government from spying on the cellphones and emails of law-abiding citizens.

Ted Cruz

#23. For 70 years there's been a consensus among scholars and the American people on a reading to the Constitution that protects the right of privacy, the autonomy of individuals, while at the same time empowering the federal government to protect the less powerful.

Joe Biden

#24. Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

Jill Lepore

#25. I'm very, very worried about the invasion of privacy rights that we're seeing not only from the N.S.A. and the government but from corporate America, as well. We're losing our privacy rights. It's a huge issue.

Bernie Sanders

#26. 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

#27. There is no transparency, Marus. It can't exist. Surveillance doesn't go both ways. There are those who watch, and those who are watched; the powerful, and the powerless.

Celeste Chaney

#28. Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.

Louis D. Brandeis

#29. There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world.

Glenn Greenwald

#30. 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

#31. Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or instrument of government - but the reverse ... If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom ...

Benno C. Schmidt Jr.

#32. We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.

Paul Broun

#33. There is no denying that Snowden's dramatic disclosures, despite the damage they did to U.S. intelligence, accomplished a salutary service in alerting both the public and the government to the potential danger of a surveillance leviathan." (p.299)

Edward Jay Epstein

#34. With those people, I'm very far apart, because I believe that government access to communications and stored records is valuable when done under tightly controlled conditions which protect legitimate privacy interests.

Dorothy Denning

#35. Perhaps Americans should recognize that if they want to keep their privacy, they should ask the federal government to do only the things that the Constitution allows.

Dave Kopel

#36. I'm quite certain the Windows 8 team is preparing to market IE 10 - and by extension, Windows 8 - as the safe, privacy-enhancing choice, capitalizing on Google's many government woes and consumers' overall unease with the search giant's power.

John Battelle

#37. When government gets between my lips and my stomach; I call that invasion of privacy!

Joel Salatin

#38. Privacy is tremendously important. I believe the American people, and all people, should be skeptical of government power, should ask hard questions: What is the authority? What is the oversight? That's the way it ought to be.

James Comey

#39. In order to have greater visibility of the larger cyber threat landscape, we must remove the government bureaucratic stovepipes that inhibit our abilities to effectively defend America while ensuring citizens' privacy and civil liberties are also protected.

Michael McCaul

#40. The Supreme Court must strike down the government's illegal spying program as a violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

Rand Paul

#41. Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

James Gleick

#42. Of course, in the U.S. the government and politics are gaining more and more ground lately at the cost of the law. The government is very smart; it evokes terror in the hearts of people to convince them to give up their freedom and privacy.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi

#43. I think what we've had in the past is the government has said, "Well, we need to collect the whole haystack." And the haystack is Americans' privacy. Every Americans' privacy. We have to give up all of our privacy.

Rand Paul

#44. Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

John Perry Barlow

#45. I certainly respect privacy and privacy rights. But on the other hand, the first function of government is to guarantee the security of all the people.

Phil Crane

#46. Ironically, one of the clearer threats to consumer privacy is the government's largely unchecked ability to collect your sensitive information without due process.

Marsha Blackburn

#47. I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

Edward Snowden