George Gilder Quotes

The global threat of 'Big Brother' can actually be conquered purely by technology.

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

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.

The power of the computer is starting to spread.

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It's not one or the other. It's both.

There is growing use of government intrusion into your creative space…. The government is able to see more deeply into our intellectual lives.

The "flatfoot mentality" insists that any individual or organization that wants to change anything in our present system is somehow subversive of "the American way," and should be under constant surveillance—a task that seems to absorb most of our resources for fighting genuine crime.

Our age has seen the birth of totalitarian systems and forms of tyranny which would not have been possible in the time before the technological leap forward.

It appears to the American people that the government is intent on prying into every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, while at the same time doing all that it can to block access to government information that would inform the American people what is being done in their name.

People are just beginning to learn how much their own personal privacy is being invaded and that they’re losing control over their own information.

Modernization vastly increased the power of the state. It gave the rulers new tools—the powers of indoctrination, surveillance, and repression.

When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

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

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.

Online censorship, mass and targeted surveillance and data collection, digital attacks on civil society and repression resulting from online expression force individuals around the world to seek security to hold opinions without interference and seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Many seek to protect their security through encryption, the scrambling of data so only intended recipients may access it

Efforts to constrain encryption through forms of extraordinary access will inevitably introduce vulnerabilities into the security of consumer products in ways that are likely to have adverse long-term effects on the security, privacy, and civil liberties of citizens.

On the social media front, governments may attempt to monitor and repress citizens’ postings or discredit incriminating reports with misinformation, but such efforts buck technological trends that are empowering consumers, such as strong encryption.

The fact that Facebook presents facial recognition programmes as a desirable development, well, that in itself is a decisive step toward fascism, as far as I'm concerned.

It is the nature of government and of technology to establish control.

We live in a moment in history in which our privacy may not be important.

Surveillance breeds conformity.

Big Brother doesn't like all these Little Brothers looking at it.