Adam Cohen Quotes

When you go into a bar, there are hundreds and hundreds of cameras in that bar - many of them installed by that bar. They might be checking something or taking a picture of you.

CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance.

Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.

It makes sense to have cameras in places where terrorism and crime are of particular concern - such as in Times Square or near major bridges and tunnels. It would be more troubling to learn, however, that the government has focused cameras on the front doors of our homes just to keep track of our comings and goings.

I'm positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies.

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.

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.

I'm someone who sits at a computer eight hours a day, and I look in that pinhole camera at the top of my screen and think, 'Someone could be watching me.'

What a jolly thing military surveillance is!

We've got the NSA getting logs of every call you make. The IRS is weaponized like Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.

The new rule says that the FBI has the right to go to public places on the same terms and conditions as other members of the public for counter-terrorism purposes.

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?

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

I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test.

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

I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.

I certainly respect privacy and privacy rights. But on the other hand, the first function of government is to guarantee the security of all the people.

As a rule, governments monitor people.

Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.

Incidentally, our railroad facilities are under video surveillance by the federal police. However, the federal and state governments will have to determine whether video surveillance shouldn't be significantly expanded to a certain degree.

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.

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