Trevor Paglen Quotes

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

I grew up with the understanding that the world I lived in was one where people enjoyed a sort of freedom to communicate with each other in privacy, without it being monitored, without it being measured or analyzed or sort of judged by these shadowy figures or systems, any time they mention anything that travels across public lines.

I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

As long as government is allowed to collect all Internet data, the perceived exigency will drive honest civil servants to reach more broadly and deeply into our networked lives.

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model?

You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

We in the ministry of IT and Communications often get flak for deciding what to ban. We actually never decide something should be banned. We always follow orders from different ministries.

I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.

Human freedom increasingly depends on who controls what we know and, therefore, how we understand our world. It depends on what information we are able to create and disseminate: what we can share, how we can share it, and with whom we can share it.

Many of our customers have serious concerns about government surveillance of the Internet. We share their concerns.

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

It's interesting - what are you willing to give up in terms of your privacy for access to other people? For access to things you think you desperately need. Ultimately, it's that old saying, isn't it? If the service is free, then the product is you. The thing being sold is you. There's a product for sale in you and your data.

There is no country on Earth where Internet and telecommunications companies do not face at least some pressure from governments to do things that would potentially infringe on users' rights to free expression and privacy.

It's high time for a fresh European alternative to enter the market, taking the existing Internet behemoths head on. What the world needs now is a cloud storage service that is not subject to uncontrolled access by intelligence agencies.

Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries, and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet.

In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.

The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone's communications.

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.

The war for the Internet has begun. Hollywood is in control of politics. The government is killing innovation.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.

If the expansion of a global legal regime for communication technologies gains traction, the effects to the global economy as well as our individual liberties will be severe.