Wendell Willkie Quotes

When a political advocacy network hires a former CIA analyst and starts tailing save-our-parks activists, you know there's something terribly dangerous happening to our democracy.

We've got the NSA getting logs of every call you make. The IRS is weaponized like Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

We need to protect the privacy rights of all Americans, and that means stopping the federal government from spying on the cellphones and emails of law-abiding citizens.

Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.

For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these liberties were once ours.

At that point, which would be around February 2002, they came and they confiscated my computer, because, they said, they were suspecting that I was communicating with certain Senate members and taking this issue outside the Bureau.

To know we are being spied on by our own government, and to have someone else's government collaborating on that, to know that data storage is so cheap your information can be kept for years and used to create any kind of story, to me that's a grave attack on human rights.

Today it is becoming harder to speak out, with the inception of the Patriot Act, the president has legislated free speech to be a crime.

It appears to the American people that the government is intent on prying into every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, while at the same time doing all that it can to block access to government information that would inform the American people what is being done in their name.

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition

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.

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

With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.

People don't object to spying on the grounds that the secret dossier about them might be full of errors. They object to spying because it's spying.

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of American history knows that unchecked spying undermines democracy and public trust.

My friends and family in Turkey could be arrested just for talking to me.

He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this [ invasions of privacy ]. So all in all, [Barack] Obama is a disaster.

The government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from cyber-snooping, but we're not.

Having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.

I do think that our freedoms are at risk.

The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.

As in Pakistan, Tunisian and Egyptian human rights activists are concerned that any censorship mechanisms, once put in place, will inevitably be abused for political purposes no matter what censorship proponents claim to the contrary.

Say what you will about Americans, but one thing they are not is passive. The Bush administration may have pushed through the Patriot Act weeks after 11 September, but, as the American public got to grips with how the law was affecting their individual rights, their protests grew loud and angry.

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

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