Quotes & Sayings About Internet Surveillance

We all want to live in a world where we can make a difference ... That's why Spider-Man fights the good fight. Or Captain Marvel. Or me. Or ... There are a lot of us. And we don't all wear masks these days. Iron Man went public. So did Captain America. Others. Probably because it's harder to keep secrets in an internet surveillance age. But I think some of it, too, is that the ethical paradox can wear you down. No one on the white-hat side has ever hidden his or her identity with less than noble intent: to make the fight about something bigger than us. To represent a greater justice, where the focus can be on right and wrong ... and not on whether the bad guys will exact reprisal on those close to us. And sometimes you have to lie ... because you can justify a lie if lives are riding on it. Even as you fight for, as the saying goes, truth and justice ... even if you're a lawyer who has sworn to live by the truth ... you willingly bear false witness. — Mark Waid

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

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

Internet exchanges and internet service providers - international fiber optic landing points - these are the key tools that governments go after in order to enable their programs of mass surveillance. If they want to be able to watch the entire population of a country instead of a single individual, you have to go after those bulk interchanges. — Edward Snowden

Surveillance is the business model of the Internet. — Bruce Schneier

The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate. — John Perry Barlow

In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks. — Evgeny Morozov

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip. — Ronald Reagan

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. — Edward Snowden

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

Since the 1970s, there has been a continual tendency to over-estimate the surveillance capacities of new technologies. In the sense of the physical invasion of privacy, surveillance comprises five sequential events: the capacity to observe; the act of observation; comprehension of what is seen; intervention on the basis of that knowledge; and a consequent change of behaviour by the subject. Too often the final four have been assumed from the possibility of the first. — David Vincent

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

For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other Internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the United States accused the Chinese of doing. — Glenn Greenwald

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

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

The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now ... cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it. — Ben Elton

I am disturbed by how states abuse laws on Internet access. I am concerned that surveillance programmes are becoming too aggressive. I understand that national security and criminal activity may justify some exceptional and narrowly-tailored use of surveillance. But that is all the more reason to safeguard human rights and fundamental freedoms. — Ban Ki-moon

That's what makes Snowden's revelations so stunning and so vitally important. By daring to expose the NSA's astonishing surveillance capabilities and its even more astounding ambitions, he has made it clear, with these disclosures, that we stand at a historic crossroads. Will the digital age usher in the individual liberation and political freedoms that the Internet is uniquely capable of unleashing? Or will it bring about a system of omnipresent monitoring and control, beyond the dreams of even the greatest tyrants of the past? Right now, either path is possible. Our actions will determine where we end up. — Glenn Greenwald

The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It's not one or the other. It's both. — John Perry Barlow

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