Quotes About Surveillance

#1. I did surveillance a lot, which sounds exciting, but it never was.

Miranda Lambert

#2. 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

#3. I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.

Jonathan Nolan

#4. For those who believe executive branch officials will voluntarily interpret their surveillance authorities with restraint, I believe it is more likely that I will achieve my life-long dream of playing in the NBA.

Ron Wyden

#5. The New York Police Department says Iran has conducted surveillance inside New York City. They say Iranian operatives are using special mobile surveillance units. I believe they're called taxi cabs.

Jay Leno

#6. Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.

Howard Rheingold

#7. Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations

Glenn Greenwald

#8. What we need to do, is restore those tools that have been taken away by the president [Barack Obama] and others, restore those tools to the NSA and to our entire surveillance and law enforcement community.

Chris Christie

#9. Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen.

Glenn Greenwald

#10. Maybe the Indirect Surveillance thing cost him brain cells. Good thing he was so pretty.

Erin Kellison

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

Sean MacBride

#12. There may not be time.' Strax said, 'to conduct a full surveillance regime according to prescribed regulations in order to formulate a coherent strategy of the best method to effect entry.'
'That's true,' Madame Vastra agreed. 'So I suggest you simply break down this door.

Justin Richards

#13. The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

Andrew Vachss

#14. On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department's top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.

Barton Gellman

#15. As our voices rise in protest, the NSA monitors your every phone call. if you have a cell phone, you are under surveillance. I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damn business,

Rand Paul

#16. The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

Barry Eisler

#17. Is mass surveillance worth it when its fiercest advocates can only say that it "contributed to our understanding" of cases "at the margins"?

Julia Angwin

#18. When you have mass surveillance, it's impossible to meet the intent of the First Amendment because reporters can't talk to sources because sources are afraid to talk.

Pierre Omidyar

#19. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten - and they're talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.

Edward Snowden

#20. Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

Richard Stallman

#21. The sense of immunity felt by a particular group currently in power is bound to be illusory. That is made clear when we look at how partisan affiliation shapes people's sense of the dangers of state surveillance. What emerges is that yesterday's cheerleaders can quickly become today's dissenters.

Anonymous

#22. History shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent.

Glenn Greenwald

#23. CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance.

Heather Brooke

#24. He didn't have regular email like everyone else. He couldn't afford that digital fingerprint that the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and all the other espionage alphabeticals counted on for their privacy-bashing surveillance of the entire formerly free world.

Kenneth Eade

#25. When it's officially allowed through a one-way mirror, it's not called spying. It's called surveillance.

Neal Shusterman

#26. Who wants to be a hundred? What's the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance.

Henry Miller

#27. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%.

Edward Snowden

#28. Lee has surveillance on Fortnum's, cameras and bugs, twenty-four seven. He put it in when I was going through my drama and never took it out. The boys at the office watch for security purposes and ... um, for kicks." I stared at her.
"You're joking," I breathed.

Kristen Ashley

#29. The paradigm of social media is one that Silicon Valley would like to extend to society at large: a technocracy of benevolent, but total, surveillance. In this kind of society, profits flow to platform owners, not those writing tweets and sharing YouTube videos.

Jacob Silverman

#30. 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

#31. Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.

Edward Snowden

#32. 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

#33. Details. Evidence gathering. Surveillance. It's the basis of everything. You've got to settle down and watch long enough and hard enough to get what you need.

Lee Child

#34. We're so intelligent now that we're too smart to survive. We're so well informed that we lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we've lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we've lost all sense of shame.

Bruce Sterling

#35. You see the mistakes of one system - the surveillance - and the mistakes of the other - the inequality - but there's nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.

Anna Funder

#36. I believe that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must be reformed. We must improve the American public's confidence in, and perception of, our national security programs, by increasing transparency, strengthening oversight, and safeguarding civil liberties.

Dutch Ruppersberger

#37. I've always been discreet - more than discreet. When a friend calls, and I'm doing something innocuous like cooking dinner, I tell them I'm reading or running out to the movies. It's the surveillance I can't stand.

Joshua Cohen

#38. The best proof of the high quality of American beef is the continued negative BSE findings supported by the highest surveillance possible. The administration should be working to increase our surveillance of BSE, not scaling it back.

Rosa DeLauro

#39. It's becoming less and less the National Security Agency and more and more the national surveillance agency. It's gaining more offensive powers with each passing year.

Edward Snowden

#40. Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.

Michel Foucault

#41. Bring the two aliens up here under surveillance." With a microsecond pause, and a finely calculated micro-modulation of pitch and timbre - nothing you could actually take offense at - Marvin managed to convey his utter contempt and horror of all things human. "Just that?" he said.

Douglas Adams

#42. This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To

Charles Stross

#43. One of the few things the Air Force did admit to me existed out there presently without admitting that it was Area 51 is this drone called the 'Beast of Kandahar' which does not fire missiles, unlike the Predator and the Reaper, but just conducts surveillance.

Annie Jacobsen

#44. There has never been a time in human history where so many people routinely carry recording and surveillance devices.

Steven Magee

#45. Sunsets require sunshine ["Surveillance: Out of the Shadows," New York Review of Books, June 2, 2015].

David Cole

#46. Incidentally, our railroad facilities are under video surveillance by the federal police. However, the federal and state governments will have to determine whether video surveillance shouldn't be significantly expanded to a certain degree.

Otto Schily

#47. The passed Pawn is a criminal, who should be kept under lock and key. Mild measures, such as police surveillance, are not sufficient

Aron Nimzowitsch

#48. Ben Zoof, whose ideas of discipline were extremely rigid, at once suggested that the colony should be put under the surveillance of the police, that the cardinal points should be placed under restraint, and that the sun should be shot for breach of discipline.

Jules Verne

#49. When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.

Tom Stoppard

#50. The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.

Edward Snowden

#51. There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings.

Margaret Atwood

#52. Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions.

Bill Gates

#53. It is not widely known that in the end, 65 per cent of the church leaders were informers for us, and the rest of them were under surveillance anyhow.

Anna Funder

#54. I came to the United States because I valued living as a free person, one who is able to advocate in a democratic society. Unfortunately, the U.S. has been turning into a less free society, a police and surveillance state, especially after 9/11.

Sami Al-Arian

#55. ...the age of surveillance is only a symptom of the new hyper-narcissism that has infected our collective reality tunnels. We invite the surveillance cameras into our homes because they are proof that someone is paying attention to us.

Moxie Mezcal

#56. The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image.

Bill Viola

#57. 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

#58. The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate.

Barton Gellman

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

Eric Schmidt

#60. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phony and fragile as East Germany did thirty years ago.

Paul Mason

#61. I spent a lot of time with the LAPD. I spent six weeks training, weapons training, ride-alongs, surveillance, interviewing them, in all different departments and divisions.

Ramon Rodriguez

#62. Police in Washington D.C. are now using cameras to catch drivers who go through red lights. Many congressmen this week opposed the use of the red light cameras incorrectly assuming they were being used for surveillance at local brothels.

Dennis Miller

#63. Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators.

Bruce Schneier

#64. For one hour a day, Lucifer took a break from his surveillance to indulge a guilty pleasure: drinking a tall, icy glass of Schweppes ginger ale and watching The O'Reilly Factor.

Robert Kroese

#65. NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.

Barton Gellman

#66. Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend; it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page.

Richard Stallman

#67. Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.

Bruce Schneier

#68. We've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.

Edward Snowden

#69. Despite the Obama administration's proclaimed commitment to global Internet freedom, the executive branch is not transparent about the types and capabilities of surveillance technologies it is sourcing and purchasing - or about what other governments are purchasing the same technology.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#70. Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

Mikko Hypponen

#71. I see battlefields that are under 24-hour real or near-real time surveillance of all types. I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we can locate through instant communications and almost instantaneous application of highly lethal firepower.

William Westmoreland

#72. Surveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.

Dave Eggers

#73. 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

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

Bruce Schneier

#75. Every time I walk by a spy shop, I think that I need to put some surveillance on somebody. Rick's been acting fishy! I need to buy a safe that looks like a Spray 'N Wash can. "Hey, Mitch, can I use the Spray 'N Wash?" "Yeah, if you want to spray your shirt with documents!"

Mitch Hedberg

#76. Many of Bush's defenders have praised him for keeping the country safe since Sept. 11, 2001. He deserves that praise, and I'm perfectly happy to defend most of his surveillance, interrogation and counterterrorism policies against his critics.

Bill Kristol

#77. As the old saying went: "Not all windowless vans have residential surveillance equipment.

Joseph Fink

#78. 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

#79. Those who are experts in the fields of surveillance, privacy, and technology say that there need to be two tracks: a policy track and a technology track. The technology track is encryption. It works and if you want privacy, then you should use it.

Laura Poitras

#80. 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

#81. Options other than mastectomy include high risk surveillance and risk reduction. Surveillance is a combination of monthly self breast exam, annual mammography and whole breast screening ultrasound, annual breast MRI, and biannual clinical breast exam.

Kristi Funk

#82. Do you have someone watching her house?" (Stephanie)
"That kind of surveillance only happens in the movies. We're so underbudgeted we're one step away from
holding bake sales to pay for toilet paper. (Morelli)

Janet Evanovich

#83. The majority of terrorist attacks that have been disrupted in the United States have been disrupted due to things like the Time Square bomber, who was caught by a hotdog vendor, not a mass surveillance program, not a cyber-espionage campaign.

Edward Snowden

#84. Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

Edward Snowden

#85. I long ago lost track of the number of times the Obama administration has assured everyone that its vacuum-cleaner approach to electronic surveillance does not threaten the privacy or the rights of Americans.

Andrew Rosenthal

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

Stephen Colbert

#87. 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

#88. If I were a Chinese dissident, I'd be grateful that Cisco had helped bring the Internet to China, but I'd also be outraged that Cisco may have helped the cops keep me under surveillance and catch me trying to organize protest activities.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#89. 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

#90. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they are their own overseer, each individual thus exercising surveillance over, and against themself.

Michel Foucault

#91. To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.

Glenn Greenwald

#92. we live in a twisted world where everything, both big and small, is subject to surveillance, and where anything worth money will always be exploited.

David Lagercrantz

#93. Raw. Weeks of surveillance had confirmed

Alexa Davis

#94. I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.

Edward Snowden

#95. I listen a little to the Democrats, and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," Giuliani continued. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-September 11 attitude of defense.

Rudy Giuliani

#96. 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

#97. The Orwellian vision was about state-sponsored surveillance. Now it's not just the state, it's your nosy neighbor, your ex-spouse and people who want to spam you.

Howard Rheingold

#98. These thieves defend themselves by saying, 'I was there all the time, and the officials missed me.' Favorite excuses for missing surveillance checkpoints: jacket covered the number took off the shirt with the number hidden in a crowd.

Joe Henderson

#99. While Congress saw some need to loosen the standard in the initial days of a war, it wanted the president to comply with FISA in carrying out surveillance in the United States.

Jonathan Turley

#100. 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