Quotes & Sayings About Nsa Surveillance

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

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

The most striking thing Snowden has revealed is the depth of what the NSA and the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the US] are doing, their hunger for all data, for total bulk dragnet surveillance where they try to collect all communications and do it all sorts of different ways. Their ethos is "collect it all." — Laura Poitras

A big factor is that the enthusiast camp's values are really rooted in Silicon Valley and in these supposedly new business models. But again, I think this such an interesting moment because things like the NSA revelations are really forcing people to recognize the connections between corporate and government surveillance. — Astra Taylor

The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge. — Barton Gellman

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

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

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

The NSA routinely receives - or intercepts - routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the United States before they are delivered to the international customers. The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal, and sends them on. — Glenn Greenwald

These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power. — Edward Snowden

As digital communications have multiplied, and NSA capabilities with them, the agency has shifted resources from surveillance of individual targets to the acquisition of communications on a planetary scale. — Barton Gellman

Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers. — Edward Snowden

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

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

When the NSA's surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden's revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world. — Noam Chomsky

Part of what we're trying to do is lay out what really happened. For example, I've been trying to get across that the intelligence leadership did not just keep the country in the dark. They actively misled the country on key issues. When you have someone who heads the NSA saying we don't hold data at all on US citizens, that's one of the most misleading statements I believe that's ever been made about surveillance policy. And I think that now we're starting to get that message across. — Ron Wyden

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

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

The domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition. The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism. Accepting that bargain enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom - "he who does not move does not notice his chains," observed Rosa Luxemburg - but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice. — Glenn Greenwald

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

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

Congress must go further to protect the right to privacy, to end the NSA's dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans, to make the intelligence community more transparent and accountable. — Elizabeth Warren

Post-9/11 surveillance has caused writers to self-censor. They avoid writing about and researching certain subjects; they're careful about communicating with sources, colleagues, or friends abroad. A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the first Snowden articles were published found that people didn't want to talk about the NSA online. A broader Harris poll found that nearly half of Americans have changed what they research, talk about, and write about because of NSA surveillance. — Bruce Schneier

NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally. — Barton Gellman

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

Thanks to Edward Snowden and others, the great threat from the NSA surveillance is now more clearly understood. Current attacks on our liberties very greatly infringe the freedoms meant to be protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. If a whistle-blower reveals the truth about wrongful government actions, calls arise to charge him with treason for hating America. Allies become enemies when it becomes known that we spy on them as well, as it has now been revealed. — Ron Paul

The Obama administration, which has brought more prosecutions against leakers than all prior presidencies combined, has sought to create a climate of fear that would stifle any attempts at whistle-blowing. But Snowden destroyed that template. He has managed to remain free, outside the grasp of the United States; what's more, he has refused to remain in hiding but proudly came forward and identified himself. As a result, the public image of him is not a convict in orange jumpsuit and shackles but and independent, articulate figure who can speak for himself, explaining what he did and why. — Glenn Greenwald

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

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

The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America. — Edward Snowden

Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free. — Edward Snowden

I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally. — Glenn Greenwald

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

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

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

Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations — Glenn Greenwald

Suspicionless surveillance has no place in a democracy. The next 60 days are a historic opportunity to rein in the NSA, but the only one who can end the worst of its abuses is you. Call your representatives and tell them that the unconstitutional 'bulk collection' of Americans' private records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act must end. — Edward Snowden

I'm sure I've had my phone tapped for years, I don't think it's a crime against humanity they just ought to quit doing it, god damn it. — Cornel West

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. — Barack Obama

Like a black hole, NSA pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to escape. — James Bamford

I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts. Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many. — Edward Snowden

For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, " 'does engage' in computer network exploitation," but "does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including 'cyber' " [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its "customers," a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce: — Glenn Greenwald

But eavesdropping acquired a new, and more intense, life after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. "Never again" was an impossible mandate, of course, but the only way to have any hope of preventing something from happening is to know everything that is happening. That led the NSA to put the entire planet under surveillance. — Bruce Schneier

One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance. — Edward Snowden