Barton Gellman Quotes

… 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 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.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

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

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!

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.

There's a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s.

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.

If we had known that one of those terrorist attacks was coming, could our government have electronically eavesdropped on the attackers without a warrant?

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.

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

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

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.

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.

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control, but I'm a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.

What a jolly thing military surveillance is!

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA's compliance record.

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

No one in their right mind can say to me with a straight face that the Patriot Act has not aggregated the Fourth Amendment.

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

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not - nor will we ever - monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subjecting our activities to rigorous oversight from numerous internal and external sources.

The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge.

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

How will we defend ourselves if the Patriot Act expires? Well, perhaps we could just rely on the Constitution and demonstrate exactly how traditional judicial warrants can gather all the info we need - and how bulk collection really hasn't worked.