Robert Mueller Quotes

Privacy may actually be an anomaly.

You can have Google or you can have privacy but you can’t have both.

It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.

As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.

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.

We have to examine very carefully any privacy-reducing technology.

We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

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

There used to be technological limitations … that provided a measure of privacy for Americans. Now with essentially no technological limitations—the technology can practically do anything—the only way to strike the appropriate balance between liberty and security is to embed that balance in the law.

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.

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its user’s most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identify thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance.

Online censorship, mass and targeted surveillance and data collection, digital attacks on civil society and repression resulting from online expression force individuals around the world to seek security to hold opinions without interference and seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Many seek to protect their security through encryption, the scrambling of data so only intended recipients may access it

There must always be a balance between protecting privacy and security. In our country, one of the ways we have struck that balance is by requiring a court order before law enforcement can access certain communications of and data on suspects.

With technology tracking us everywhere we go, 'cosplay' might become our best defense against surveillance.

I particularly recognize that reasonable people can disagree as to what that proper balance or blend is between privacy and security and safety.

I knew from the beginning that privacy was going to be a huge issue, especially with regard to applying Total Information Awareness in counterterrorism. Because if the technology development was successful, a logical place to apply it was inside the United States.

I do mind some of the intrusions on privacy.

Privacy isn't negotiable. It's the right of every American.

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

I have nothing to hide!

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 last refuge of privacy cannot be placed solely in law or technology. It must repose in both, and a thoughtful combination of the two can help us thread a path between having all our secrets trivially discoverable and preserving nothing for our later selves for fear of that discovery.

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

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.