Dennis Miller Quotes

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.

I don't want to weaken the Patriot Act. I want to repeal it.

The Patriot Act is essential to our continued success in the war on terror here at home.

I've been pulled over five times for speeding - and talked my way out of every single ticket!

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

Trade shows such as the wire tappers' ball are highly secretive and ban journalists from attending. None of the U.S. agencies that attended the wire tappers' ball - including the FBI, the Secret Service, and every branch of the military - were willing to comment when a reporter queried them about their attendance.

Some believe that the FBI has these phenomenal capabilities to access any information at any time - that we can get what we want, when we want it, by flipping some sort of switch. It may be true in the movies or on TV. It is simply not the case in real life.

Security is a component of everyday life that one spending time in Washington, D.C., gets accustomed to. Metal detectors, police vehicle barriers and heavily-armed police officers become strangely commonplace after awhile.

If you're driving, and a cop is behind you, you automatically think they're going to pull you over, but cops have so much more going on than to think about pulling you over. The last thing a real cop wants to do is write a ticket. That's the truth.

The very controversial National Identification Act of 1991, requiring all United States citizens to carry identification, has greatly enhanced the ability of law enforcement officers to identify criminals and terrorists.

Today it is becoming harder to speak out, with the inception of the Patriot Act, the president has legislated free speech to be a crime.

It is unclear exactly how many law enforcement agencies are currently using this capability, but it is reasonable to say that while resource limitations used to discourage the government from tracking you without a good reason, these constraints have largely disappeared.

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

You are becoming a left wing McCarthyite …. The FBI has better things to do than to listen to our conversations.

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.

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.

In circumstances involving dramatic technological change, the best solution to privacy concerns may be legislative. A legislative body is well situated to gauge changing public attitudes, to draw detailed lines, and to balance privacy and public safety in a comprehensive way.

David Cameron has already said, and I have said, that a Conservative government would be giving the security agencies and law enforcement agencies the powers that they need to ensure that they are keeping up to date as people communicate with data.

For every cyclist who jumps a red light, a thousand drivers break speed limits or gape dangerously at their smartphones while driving.

When the government takes video of people in public places, the images should only be kept as long as they may reasonably be needed to investigate a crime. After a few days, if there has not been a report of a crime, they should be destroyed.

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.

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.

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.

The USA Freedom Act expands that so now we have cell phones, now we have Internet phones, now we have the phones that terrorists are likely to use and the focus of law enforcement is on targeting the bad guys.

Let's say tomorrow that there was a president, that we elected a president that eliminated the bulk collection of data. Let's just say it happened. What do you think would happen? People are like 'the sky would fall. We would be overrun with jihadists.' Maybe we could rely on the Constitution. Maybe we could get warrants. ... If you make the warrant specific, there's no limit to what you can get through a warrant.