Bruce Schneier Quotes

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

I'm tired of living in a police state.

When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, it's time for the Director no longer to be the Director.

Homeland security intelligence done the wrong way will give us thought police.

I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.

If there's any credence to the guy who wrote 'Drones Over Blkyn' a year before drones were flying over Brooklyn, then listen to me: we're going to be in fascist police state.

One thing about a police state, you can always find the police.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

Everywhere we look we see the encroaching shadow of the police state.

A functioning police state needs no police.

The "flatfoot mentality" insists that any individual or organization that wants to change anything in our present system is somehow subversive of "the American way," and should be under constant surveillance—a task that seems to absorb most of our resources for fighting genuine crime.

It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.

A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals’ rights – which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.

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

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.

The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

When making public policy decisions about new technologies for the Government, I think one should ask oneself which technologies would best strengthen the hand of a police state. Then, do not allow the Government to deploy those technologies.

A policemans job is only easy in a police state.

Surveillance breeds conformity.

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.