Surveillance Quotes

Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations

Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.

At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone, there was a constant surveillance by UFOs.

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

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

History shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.

When they say accountability, they mean surveillance and standardization.

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.

If we had failed to pursue the facts as far as they led, we would have denied the public any knowledge of an unprecedented scheme of political surveillance and sabotage.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

The invocation of science,
of its ground rules,
of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become,
now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free,
uncoddled,
undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned.
Science and scholarship,
the medium of autonomy,
has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.

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

Choosing providers is not a choice between surveillance/not; it's just choosing which feudal lord gets to spy on you.

The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything.

Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.

As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known. It has been revealed through Wikileaks and other journalists around the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.

If we don't do anything, if we go along with the status quo, we are going to have a mass surveillance world.

The president has the authority to end this dragnet surveillance immediately

I have been placed under surveillance, and I can't take a step without it being known to the Polish minister of internal affairs.

Martin Luther King was a victim of surveillance, and had great solidarity with victims of surveillance.

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.

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

There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society.

What we have now in America is a surveillance society.

There was a possibility I could have been under surveillance.

I was hoping to catch [Vladimir] Putin in a lie - like what happened to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper [in his congressional testimony]. So I asked Putin basically the same questions about Russian mass surveillance. I knew he's doing the same thing, but he denied it.

Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

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.

Surveillance induced morality: relics of cultural retardation.

A more effective international disease surveillance system is essential for global security both against a bioterrorist attack or a naturally occurring disease.

Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.

We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.

We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can't have the national surveillance agency.

The internet is like a surround system, a landscape at its most benign, a closed system of surveillance and self-surveillance at its more sinister. Something we can no longer imagine an outside of.

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.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

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.

I considered bringing forward information about these surveillance programs prior to the election, but I held off because I believed that [Barack] Obama was genuine when he said he was going to change things. I wanted to give the democratic process time to work.

The issue I brought forward most clearly was that of mass surveillance, not of surveillance in general.

What a jolly thing military surveillance is!

Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.

I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.

The threat is that the public will know what the government is up to. Any system of power is going to want to keep free from public surveillance, that's natural. Its shouldn't be but, its very natural.

I have no private life, as I am constantly under police surveillance.

You can't assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible.

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.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

A crucial question is how to balance surveillance with privacy and keeping Americans safe.