Rand Paul Quotes

I think the vast majority of the American people say you shouldn't be able to collect my phone records if I'm not suspicious, if you don't have probable cause.

Let's say tomorrow that there was a president, that we elected a president that eliminated the bulk collection of data. Let's just say it happened. What do you think would happen? People are like 'the sky would fall. We would be overrun with jihadists.' Maybe we could rely on the Constitution. Maybe we could get warrants. ... If you make the warrant specific, there's no limit to what you can get through a warrant.

I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people.

What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA's own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.

One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy.

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.

I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

There's a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s.

The United States Intelligence community collects too much information.

Here are some additional things we (the National Security Agency) can do for the War on Terror but we may not do them because we do not have the authority

… there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the... telephony meta-data program.

… the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information.

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

The National Security Agency vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from or within the United States.

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people's Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.

The NSA is not listening to anyone's phone calls. They're not reading any Americans' e-mails. They're collecting simply the data that your phone company already has, and which you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, so they can search that data quickly in the event of a terrorist plot.

You've got the NSA doing all this collecting of material on all of its citizens - that's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did.