Bob Beckel Quotes

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.

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

Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.

The people of the FBI are sworn to protect both security and liberty. It isn't a question of conflict. We must care deeply about protecting liberty through due process of law, while also safeguarding the citizens we serve - in every investigation.

What is the government doing or not doing in terms of tracking you, following you, investigating you? And if you're suspicionless, it should be none of the above.

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.

America is way too quick to trade freedom for the illusion of security. Whether it's allowing the NSA to go way too far in what it intercepts of our personal data, to our government monitoring of everything domestically and spending way more than we should.

The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency.

The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.

No one in their right mind can say to me with a straight face that the Patriot Act has not aggregated the Fourth Amendment.

I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

I certainly respect privacy and privacy rights. But on the other hand, the first function of government is to guarantee the security of all the people.

As a rule, governments monitor people.

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.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

Americans don’t need a big government to read their e-mail and track what else they do

We all want security …. But we don’t need to simplify the debate to such an extent that we simply say we have to give up our liberties.

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

There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.

Opponents of civil liberties contend the NSA data collection has made our country more safe, but even the most vocal defenders of the program have failed to identify a single thwarted plot.

The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation's security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make.

I think most people accept that it is necessary to have some surveillance in a democratic society. I think most people accept that it's important to have limits and clear safeguards on that.

I'm positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies.

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control, but I'm a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.