David Ignatius Quotes

Privacy and security are the ultimate shared responsibility, and everyone - including governments, companies, and citizens - have an important role to play.

Certainly I support the Constitution, and I respect people's privacy, but I also think we need to err on the side of protecting us.

Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy.

The U.S. Constitution protects our privacy from the prying eyes of government. It does not, however, protect us from the prying eyes of companies and corporations.

The issue of wiretapping raises the issue of the balance between human liberty and the requirements of national security. I would say that the weight should be on the side of human liberty and that if human liberty is ever to be infringed, the demonstration on the national security side must be overwhelming.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security.

A democratic country has zero tolerance for all illegal monitoring operations.

A back door is a nonstarter. It means we are all not safe... I don't support a back door for any government, ever.

Our national security requires us to be strong and fearless, but not at the cost of personal privacy.

There is no world of absolute, complete privacy or a world of complete national security.

I accept you need the right balance, people do need to know their privacy is protected, but when it's essential information which will be dealt with by security agencies... I do feel the public interest overrides that.

Clearly we must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack, but we can and must do so in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society. We can do that without living in an Orwellian world where the government and private corporations know every telephone call that we make, every website we visit, everyplace we go.

The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.

The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything.

I really believe that we don't have to make a trade-off between security and privacy. I think technology gives us the ability to have both.

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.

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

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

QQ is not secure. You might as well be sharing your information with the Public Security Bureau.

We have never really had absolute privacy with our records or our electronic communications - government agencies have always been able to gain access with appropriate court orders.

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

As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives - including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies - will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.

Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.