Quotes About Government Surveillance

#1. The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything,

Eric Schmidt

#2. Corporate and government surveillance aren't separate; they're an alliance of interests.

Bruce Schneier

#3. Bringing an end to mass government surveillance needs to be a central pillar of returning to the principles we have put in jeopardy in the early 21st century.

Yochai Benkler

#4. 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

#5. Republicans don't want to shrink government. They want more and more military, more and more surveillance. They'd like to have the government banning gay marriage and so forth.

John Zerzan

#6. My idea being that for the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you do not have to look far away. You have to know how to see.

Hedda Sterne

#7. It seems whenever the government doesn't want anyone to know something, it is all of a sudden critical to national security.

Kenneth Eade

#8. Nobody in the government is talking. They say it's a case of national security.

Kenneth Eade

#9. 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

#10. Keep under strict surveillance and control those secret establishments which, within your government structures, seem to regard themselves as above the law.

Sean MacBride

#11. 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

#12. Today we are at a crossroads. The technology is available for two great options: The massive surveillance state, or the renewed freedom of a deeply-involved citizenry thinking independently and holding the government to the highest standards.

Oliver DeMille

#13. If we are going to try to get across to the poorest people in the world that we care about their plight and we want them to join one world with the rest of us, we have got to make promises and keep promises.

David Cameron

#14. 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

#15. We do not take away the powers of surveillance. We do not take away the right and the power of the government to go after those who would do us wrong.

Larry Craig

#16. If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government's been hiding.

Stephen Colbert

#17. 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

#18. 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.

Larry Page

#19. When you can no longer differentiate between the insanity spewed onto the blank page, and the madness evident in the all-but shattered mirror ... that's when you know you're doing it right.

Dave Matthes

#20. Yes, long hours and a hard life for my parents, but for a six to seven year old every new day dawned with fresh excitement when you have not a care in the world, and so much to learn and witness.

Vernon L. Smith

#21. Perfect love holds the secret of the world's perfect liberty.

J.G. Holland

#22. I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

Richard Feynman

#23. 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

#24. To ignore one's spiritual self is unsettling, to say the least. That's a very profound outlook on it.

Linda Blair

#25. 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

#26. Surveillance is surveillance. I can never understand why some people think it matters whether it's the government doing it to you or a company.

Ken Liu

#27. 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

#28. it is not clear that the government needed dragnets to catch Zazi. If Zazi was e-mailing with terrorists under surveillance, a search warrant would have sufficed to capture his communications. Similarly,

Julia Angwin

#29. The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.

Gore Vidal

#30. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen ...

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#31. Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

Mikko Hypponen

#32. As Chomsky says, if you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours, the choice is yours. Robert

Noam Chomsky