Rand Paul Quotes

The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

It's casual Friday, which means that at the White House, they're casually going through everybody's phone calls and records.

The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.

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.

The Obama administration has framed its defense of the controversial bulk collection of all American phone records as necessary to prevent a future 9/11.

To say the U.S. government is targeting U.S. persons, to listen to their phone calls and read their emails, is just false.

The issue I brought forward most clearly was that of mass surveillance, not of surveillance in general.

Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now [with Barack Obama].

That's not how national security works... I don't care what the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we the private citizens!

I never thought I'd see the day when the U.S. government could listen in on phone conversations or read private mail without first obtaining a warrant from a court. That sounds more like something that happened in the Soviet Union.

How will we defend ourselves if the Patriot Act expires? Well, perhaps we could just rely on the Constitution and demonstrate exactly how traditional judicial warrants can gather all the info we need - and how bulk collection really hasn't worked.

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.

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

The NSA has thrown Silicon Valley under the bus.

The NSA surveillance programs have crossed the line of proportionality. Even if one could conceivably justify the initial inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders, their continued storage in Government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how the information will be used in the future?

It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights.

I long ago lost track of the number of times the Obama administration has assured everyone that its vacuum-cleaner approach to electronic surveillance does not threaten the privacy or the rights of Americans.

The revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing data on countless law-abiding American citizens has aroused great concern about the potential threat such an effort poses to liberty.

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 '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.

It is important to note that Edward Snowden was labeled as a spy not a whistle-blower - even though he exposed the reach of the spy services into the lives of most Americans. More importantly, he was denounced as being part of a generation that unfortunately combined being educated with a distrust of authority.

The domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition. The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism. Accepting that bargain enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom - "he who does not move does not notice his chains," observed Rosa Luxemburg - but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.

I think most Americans are against illegal surveillance of their emails and telephone calls by the government.