James Gleick Quotes

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

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.

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.

I think most people accept that it is necessary to have some surveillance in a democratic society. I think most people accept that it's important to have limits and clear safeguards on that.

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

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

The U.S. Constitution protects our privacy from the prying eyes of government. It does not, however, protect us from the prying eyes of companies and corporations.

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.

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?

A democratic country has zero tolerance for all illegal monitoring operations.

Unfettered discretion [in obtaining information could] alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.

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.

In a democracy there will always be a tension between security and privacy.

Clearly we must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack, but we can and must do so in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society. We can do that without living in an Orwellian world where the government and private corporations know every telephone call that we make, every website we visit, everyplace we go.

Ironically, one of the clearer threats to consumer privacy is the government's largely unchecked ability to collect your sensitive information without due process.

I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card.

We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free Internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble.

How to strike the right balance between our privacy and our expectation that the state will protect us and facilitate our freedom is one of the most difficult challenges facing us all.

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.

I have nothing to hide!

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.

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

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 more authority a person asks for in a democracy, the less privacy they’re entitled to.