Keir Starmer Quotes

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

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

Privacy is a right, but as in any democratic society, it is not an absolute right.

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.

Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

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.

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.

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

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

Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.

It is not possible to debate the balance between privacy and security, including the rights and wrongs of intrusive powers, without also understanding the threats.

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.

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.

The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police.

As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives - including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies - will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.

Even in democratic society, we don't have good answers how to balance the need for security on one hand and the protection of free speech on the other in our digital networks.

I have nothing to hide!

Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

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.

I believe the Patriot Act strikes the right balance needed to protect our freedom and security.

Privacy, in my point of view, is a civil liberty that our Founding Fathers thought of a long time ago and concluded ... was an essential part of what it was to be an American.

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

How far are we to go in pursuit of greater security at the cost of essential liberties?

The right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest.

There isn’t any doubt that in fighting the War on Terrorism you increase the power and scope of government, and it becomes more intrusive.