Trevor Paglen Quotes

The Internet has made us richer, freer, connected and informed in ways its founders could not have dreamt of. It has also become a vector of attack, espionage, crime and harm.

When we talk about computer network exploitation, computer network attack, we're not just talking about your home PC. We're talking about your cell phone, and we're also talking about internet routers themselves. The NSA is attacking the critical infrastructure of the internet to try to take ownership of it. They hack the routers that connect nations to the internet itself.

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.

Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom.

We demand privacy, yet we glorify those that break into computers.

The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow.

The most important impact of technology on communications security is that it draws better and better traffic into vulnerable channels.

Snowden was extremely good at digital self-defense. When he was employed by the C.I.A. and N.S.A., one of his jobs was to teach U.S. national security officials and C.I.A. employees how to protect their data in high-threat digital environments.

As our use of technologies grows exponentially, so do our country's vulnerabilities. Our national security depends on the stability and reliability of our communications infrastructure. The cyber threat to IT and national security systems has never been greater.

I do agree that when it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth.

We are at war - undeclared and of such a subtle nature that few have noticed - but war nevertheless. It is a cyberwar on many fronts, in which it is difficult to identify who is friend and who is foe. I will predict now, as unintelligible as it may seem, that Anonymous will turn out to be more friend than foe.

I don't believe in privacy. I mean, I like the idea of privacy, but I don't believe that it happens anymore. I think privacy is something, I am afraid, we seem to be waving goodbye to.

The problem of end-to-end encryption isn't just a terrorism issue.

The Internet - central to modern life - provides new ways for our enemies to plan and act against us.

We know that the government in China has been involved in cyber attacks before. I look at our partners around the world, our traditional allies, our NATO partners who are making the same assessment. We share so much with them and rely on their technology, their expertise and interoperability in many aspects of our own armed forces.

In cyberspace, it is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold security for one's own country by sacrificing that of others.

Our adversaries - terrorists, foreign intelligence services, and criminals - take advantage of modern technology to hide their communications; recruit followers; and plan, conduct, and encourage espionage, cyber attacks, or terrorism to disperse information on different methods to attack the U.S. homeland and to facilitate other illegal activities.

Cyber security will be an issue that I will be absolutely focused on as president. Because whether it's Russia, or China, Iran or North Korea more and more countries are using hacking to steal our information, to use it to their advantage. And we can't let that go on.

The internet exchange is sort of the core points where all of the international cables come together, where all of the internet service providers come together, and they trade lines with each other. These are priority one targets for any sort of espionage agency, because they provide access to so many people's communications.

Every time we walk on to the field of battle and the field of battle is the internet, it doesn't matter if we shoot our opponents a hundred times and hit every time. As long as they've hit us once, we've lost, because the U.S. is so much more reliant on those systems.

So when Putin goes out to buy a Coke, thirty seconds later it is known in Washington DC.

Internet exchanges and internet service providers - international fiber optic landing points - these are the key tools that governments go after in order to enable their programs of mass surveillance. If they want to be able to watch the entire population of a country instead of a single individual, you have to go after those bulk interchanges.

Cyberspace is the battlefield of tomorrow... Instead of confronting us head-to-head on the traditional battlefield, adversaries will confront the U.S. at its point of least resistance- our information infrastructure.

I'm not dying for everyone to hear everything we do. Forty minutes every two years is sensible.