Barack Obama Quotes

If we give up all our privacy rights, have we become any safer?

We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.

Privacy isn't negotiable. It's the right of every American.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

You can have Google or you can have privacy but you can’t have both.

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.

I want to make it clear … that America is not interested in spying on ordinary citizens.

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.

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.

I do believe when there are advances in technology that it is important to balance the privacy interests affected with the investigative take that you might get from that technology.

Privacy may actually be an anomaly.

We have to examine very carefully any privacy-reducing technology.

I certainly respect privacy and privacy rights. But on the other hand, the first function of government is to guarantee the security of all the people.

The companies that do the best job on managing a user's privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful.

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 safety and security of the nation depends more so than ever before on intelligence.

If we take away all our privacy rights, we become our own terrorists.

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about.

There used to be technological limitations … that provided a measure of privacy for Americans. Now with essentially no technological limitations—the technology can practically do anything—the only way to strike the appropriate balance between liberty and security is to embed that balance in the law.

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

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

I want to stand up and cheer until I realize what he told me was all the great things about my privacy except that he really told me between the lines is that he is going to continue to collect all my private records without a warrant.

People voluntarily surrender personal and seemingly private information to trans-national corporations which exploit that data for profit. Few think twice about it.

Privacy violations should be considered criminal offences.