William Binney Quotes

The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities in American history... The real problem is that they're using these capabilities to make us vulnerable.

… there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the... telephony meta-data program.

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

The revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing data on countless law-abiding American citizens has aroused great concern about the potential threat such an effort poses to liberty.

America is way too quick to trade freedom for the illusion of security. Whether it's allowing the NSA to go way too far in what it intercepts of our personal data, to our government monitoring of everything domestically and spending way more than we should.

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

I thought that the AIVD was there to protect citizens like me.

For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.

I believe that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must be reformed. We must improve the American public's confidence in, and perception of, our national security programs, by increasing transparency, strengthening oversight, and safeguarding civil liberties.

To defend our country we need to gather intelligence on the enemy, but when the intelligence lies to Congress, how are we to trust them? The phone records of law abiding citizens are none of their damn business.

I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.

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.

Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial?

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.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

The CIA and NSA are not supposed to be involved in American law enforcement.

Instead of focusing on Snowden and shooting the messenger, we should really focus on the crimes of the NSA [National Security Agency]. Whatever laws Snowden may or may not have broken, they are infinitesimally small compared to the two major surveillance laws and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution that the NSA violated.

Plaintiffs have a very significant expectation of privacy in an aggregated collection of their telephony metadata covering the last five years …. the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature…. The program infringes of that degree of privacy that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.

The message to the NSA is coming from every branch of our government, from every corner of our nation. NSA, you’ve gone too far!

The question is not whether granting the government [this] authority makes us incrementally safer, but whether the additional safety is worth the sacrifice in terms of individual privacy, personal liberty and public trust.

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.