Barack Obama 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.

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

… 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.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

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.

Secrecy at the level of the individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret.

Plaintiffs have a very significant expectation of privacy in an aggregated collection of their telephony metadata covering the last five years …. the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature…. The program infringes of that degree of privacy that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.

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.

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

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

I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.

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.

We should outlaw all wiretapping—public and private, wherever and whenever it occurs, except when the security of the nation itself is at stake—and then only with the strictest safeguards.

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.

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.

The evidence does not support the proposition that there is a significant measure of safety that is added as a result of collecting all these records on law abiding Americans.

The message to the NSA is coming from every branch of our government, from every corner of our nation. NSA, you’ve gone too far!

Those who are troubled by our existing programs are not interested in repeating the tragedy of 9-11. And those who defend these programs are not dismissive of civil liberties. The challenge is getting the details right and that is not simple.

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

One can doubt the sincerity of the technology community’s outrage over the NSA’s surveillance practices—doubt, for example, that the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company reportedly stores petabytes’ worth of data about its billion-plus active monthly users, was shocked at the thought of mass data collection.

[The FBI v. Apple Case] threatens a radical transformation of the relationship between the government and the governed.

On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil.

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

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

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