Adam Cohen Quotes

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

What is to stop the government from demanding that Apple write code to turn on the microphone [of a user's iPhone] in aid of government surveillance, activate the video camera, surreptitiously record conversations, or turn on location services to track the phone’s user? Nothing.

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

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.

Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

Many of our customers have serious concerns about government surveillance of the Internet. We share their concerns.

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its user’s most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identify thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance.

Efforts to constrain encryption through forms of extraordinary access will inevitably introduce vulnerabilities into the security of consumer products in ways that are likely to have adverse long-term effects on the security, privacy, and civil liberties of citizens.

Once you put in backdoors, once you allow a government to intercept anything they want, you have to give it to other governments around the world. Once you do that, there is no privacy; there is no security. There is no protection for democracy.

Our government should not be spying on the electronic communications of American citizens. Nor should our iPhones or Android devices be subject to unreasonable searches and seizures.

Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people.

Man, I don't want to have nothing to do with computers. I don't want the government in my business.

The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.

The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom.

We have never really had absolute privacy with our records or our electronic communications - government agencies have always been able to gain access with appropriate court orders.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

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.

While the federal government is required by law to document publicly its wiretapping of phone lines, it is not required to do so with Internet communications.

I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone it's going to be recorded and it goes to the government. I think the public can understand that.

What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that.

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!

Bringing an end to mass government surveillance needs to be a central pillar of returning to the principles we have put in jeopardy in the early 21st century.

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

There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.

With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.