Quotes & Sayings About Electronic Surveillance

Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. The agency is devoted to one overarching mission: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp. — Glenn Greenwald

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

There already exists the electronic capability for the tracking of individual behavior by centralized networks of surveillance and record-keeping computers. It is highly probable that the conversion to nuclear energy production will provide precisely those basic material conditions most appropriate for using the power of the computer to establish a new and enduring form of despotism. Only by decentralizing our basic mode of energy production - by breaking the cartels that monopolize the present system of energy production and by creating new decentralized forms of energy technology - can we restore the ecological and cultural configuration that led to the emergence of political democracy in Europe. — Marvin Harris

[H]aving the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian. — Glenn Greenwald

As we have all said, we understand that electronic surveillance is a vital tool in the war on terror. We all want to know when Osama bin Laden is calling: when he is calling, who he is calling, and what he is saying. — Chris Van Hollen

The president and the vice president wanted the FBI to execute searches in secret, avoiding the strictures of the legal and constitutional standards set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations - both callers and receivers - and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar — Tim Weiner

We have put over £2bn in the last three years into counter-terrorism and we are developing the electronic border surveillance and identity cards — David Blunkett

Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. — Glenn Greenwald

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. — Jeffrey Toobin

But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.'
'What sort of tools?'
'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason - or are manipulated into reasoning - that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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

Also, with information having just come out at the time about J. Edgar Hoover's electronic surveillance of Dr. King, it gave greater weight to the statements of those persons who were alleging involvement of the FBI. — Louis Stokes

You can't have a bad time at Disney World. It's not allowed. They have hidden electronic surveillance cameras everywhere, and if they catch you failing to laugh with childlike wonder, they lock you inside a costume representing a beloved Disney character such as Goofy and make you walk about in the Florida heat getting grabbed and leaped on by violently excited children until you have learned your lesson. — Dave Barry

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

In my view, it is an error to think about 'alternatives to prison' if what we mean by that is 'electronic bracelets,' through which people are subject to computer-monitored house arrest, or granting fuller surveillance and disciplinary powers and technologies to other state agencies, such as welfare and mental health, through 'transcarceration' policies ... We need to decrease, not increase, the means by which the state, in its multifarious networks of authority, controls human lives and selectively incapacitates people who, no less than others, have the potential to contribute to the improvement of hte human condition. — Karlene Faith