Jonathan Yardley Quotes

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.

It is true that authoritarian governments increasingly see the Internet as a threat in part because they see the U.S. government behind the Internet.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves.

A government that spies on people to find out what they are thinking is a government that isn’t listing to them.

To uphold state security China like many other countries of the world has placed some restrictions on the Internet to protect the freedom of the majority of the people.

Many of our customers have serious concerns about government surveillance of the Internet. We share their concerns.

I can’t allow the U. S. Government to destroy privacy and basic liberties.

State intervention in the literary realm went far beyond the blue-penciling of texts. It extended to the shaping of literature itself as a force at work throughout the social order. If states wielded such power in the age of print, what will restrain them from abusing it in the age of the Internet?

One can doubt the sincerity of the technology community’s outrage over the NSA’s surveillance practices—doubt, for example, that the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company reportedly stores petabytes’ worth of data about its billion-plus active monthly users, was shocked at the thought of mass data collection.

Unfettered discretion [in obtaining information could] alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.

Political oppositionary activity on the Russian Internet caused the government to pass laws limiting both service operators and users. As a result, the Russian tech environment became much less liberal, losing freedom as one of its competitive advantages.

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

Whether it's Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete.

Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries, and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet.

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.

Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today, a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.

I grew up with the understanding that the world I lived in was one where people enjoyed a sort of freedom to communicate with each other in privacy, without it being monitored, without it being measured or analyzed or sort of judged by these shadowy figures or systems, any time they mention anything that travels across public lines.

We in the ministry of IT and Communications often get flak for deciding what to ban. We actually never decide something should be banned. We always follow orders from different ministries.

The Chinese government sometimes shuts down the Internet and mobile services in specific areas where unrest occurs.

The privacy and dignity of our citizens are being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen – a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.

We may have government surveillance people listening in on Quaker anti-war meetings.

You really can’t have a democracy if the government knows the content of every conversation between journalists and their sources. You can’t have a democracy with that kind of surveillance going on.

Either we, as a society, decide that copyright is the greater value to society, and take active steps to give up private communications as a concept. Either that, or we decide that the ability to communicate in private, without constant monitoring by authorities, has the greater value - in which case copyright will have to give way.

When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else.