Ron Wyden Quotes

What is the government doing or not doing in terms of tracking you, following you, investigating you? And if you're suspicionless, it should be none of the above.

Let me make this very clear: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, our digital exhaust is being sucked up by the government. It is being compiled on big server farms and it's being analyzed by different computer programs, looking for any hint that you and I are up to no good.

Police departments no longer have to pay overtime or divert resources from other projects to find out where an individual goes - all they have to do is place a tracking device on someone's car or ask a cell phone company for that individual's location history and the technology does the work for them.

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.

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 public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.

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

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.

In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.

The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.

I don't think the government is out to get me or help someone else get me but it wouldn't surprise me if they were out to sell me something or help someone else sell me something. I mean, why else would the Census Bureau want to know my telephone number?

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

We need to protect the privacy rights of all Americans, and that means stopping the federal government from spying on the cellphones and emails of law-abiding citizens.

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.

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.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

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.

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.

Americans don’t need a big government to read their e-mail and track what else they do

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

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.

You don't hear anybody talking about what FBI is doing with the NSA collected data. That's because they're doing it in secret. I mean, they're also using it to convict people of crimes, and that's what they're doing - they're looking at it for criminal activity.

Just because technological advances have made it easier for the federal government to collect information doesn't mean that our privacy rights can or should be violated on the ground or in the air.