Jane Harman Quotes

There is growing use of government intrusion into your creative space…. The government is able to see more deeply into our intellectual lives.

I’d rather risk being a terrorists victim than live under a surveillance state.

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.

If we give up all our privacy rights, have we become any safer?

If we take away all our privacy rights, we become our own terrorists.

I want to make it clear … that America is not interested in spying on ordinary citizens.

… the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information.

Surveillance is just getting too easy right now. And this is only because of technology..

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.

There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.

Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

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

Since the first Patriot Act, as this has evolved, more and more of the privacy of Americans is disappearing. And that’s going to hurt us; it’s not going to make us safer.

You are becoming a left wing McCarthyite …. The FBI has better things to do than to listen to our conversations.

Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.

The question is not whether granting the government [this] authority makes us incrementally safer, but whether the additional safety is worth the sacrifice in terms of individual privacy, personal liberty and public trust.

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

We don't want our government building files on what people think about their government.

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.

What we have now in America is a surveillance society.

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