Ben Shapiro Quotes

Using flimsy evidence to spy on innocent citizens could very well be a crime.

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Smith v. Maryland that a few days' worth of phone records for a single individual were not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The NSA today, though, collects hundreds of millions of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans without an individualized warrant.

It must always be remembered that what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.

[The FBI v. Apple Case] threatens a radical transformation of the relationship between the government and the governed.

Spying on our citizens? That's just wrong.

Unwarranted search and seizure by the government officials was unacceptable to the American revolutionaries. Shouldn't it be unacceptable in the digital age, too?

I believe that any violation of privacy is nothing good.

I might have lived in England for the last several years, but I'm still an American citizen and I have not given up my right to privacy.

We have never really had absolute privacy with our records or our electronic communications - government agencies have always been able to gain access with appropriate court orders.

Personal privacy is a closely held American value.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

In America, after 9/11, and after the death of bin Laden, and after two wars, one of them fought, a lot of people think, on false pretenses, and definitely post the Patriot Act, there are a lot of these questions about what can we do to our citizens in order to prevent the next attack.

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.

Whether you breach the Fourth Amendment 20 percent of the time or 100 percent of the time, it's still not the point. The point is whether or not you still collect millions of people's information with a single warrant.

We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.

The privacy and dignity of our citizens are being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen – a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.

The court’s agents may enter into men’s houses, break up their chests and chambers

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

I want to stand up and cheer until I realize what he told me was all the great things about my privacy except that he really told me between the lines is that he is going to continue to collect all my private records without a warrant.

What is to stop the government from demanding that Apple write code to turn on the microphone [of a user's iPhone] in aid of government surveillance, activate the video camera, surreptitiously record conversations, or turn on location services to track the phone’s user? Nothing.

I love strong encryption. It protects us in so many ways from bad people. But it takes us to a place - absolute privacy - that we have not been to before.

The NSA is not listening to anyone's phone calls. They're not reading any Americans' e-mails. They're collecting simply the data that your phone company already has, and which you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, so they can search that data quickly in the event of a terrorist plot.

The fourth amendment specifically was designed to prohibit general warrants. How could collecting every piece of phone data be perceived as anything but a general warrant?

On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil.