Julian Assange Quotes

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft—they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud and even if you just send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. They give NSA direct access that they don’t oversee so that they can’t be held libel for it.

Internet privacy is dwindling. Every purchase you make, flight you take, website you view, file you download, person you call, and e-mail you send is tracked. … and then stored indefinitely and often sold to the highest bidder—whoever that may be. Personal data, long thought to be confidential simply isn’t anymore.

At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the U.S. to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the U.S. The NSA lies about what it stores.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.

Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user.

Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the Internet through 'like' buttons and universal logins - giving them huge power over our online identities and activities.

There is no longer any anonymity on the Web - unless we mandate it. The most personal information about your online habits is collected, bought and sold, often instantaneously and invisibly. Data collection is a business driven by profits at consumers' expense.

The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone's communications.

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.

Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend; it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page.

Governmental surveillance is not about the government collecting the information you're sharing publicly and willingly; it's about collecting the information you don't think you're sharing at all, such as the online searches you do on search engines... or private emails or text messages... or the location of your mobile phone at any time.

Every single means of communication amongst the public, the government has antennae into, to find out who is liable to be sympathetic and who is not liable to be sympathetic, and I think this has probably been going on since all channels of communication began.

Secrecy at the level of the individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret.

Google, Facebook, and the thousands of other companies that seek to join their ranks do more every day to collect data about you and I than any surveillance state could ever accomplish. They track our behavior, our communications. The moment to moment decisions we make in every room of our house

The National Security Agency vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from or within the United States.

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.

You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people's Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.

There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens' every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.

Our movements and feelings are constantly monitored, because surveillance is the business model of the digital age.

The 'Patriot Act,' 'Enhancing domestic security,' and 'Protect America' all sound great - until you realize that they're catch phrases for programs that contain roving wire taps without a warrant and the collection and sale of your personal information to the U.S. government.

If you are interacting with anything on your phone or your computer, it is specifically designed to collect as much data about you as possible, so that that can then be monetized.