John Ashcroft Quotes

The idea that you can be totally anonymous in the digital age is increasingly hard to execute.

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.

Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions. Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.

The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything.

Governments are scared of software.

The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom.

I think that the people who are trying to shut down WikiLeaks are going to have to accept this as a fact of reality that cryptography allows you to do this kind of thing.

Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.

The last refuge of privacy cannot be placed solely in law or technology. It must repose in both, and a thoughtful combination of the two can help us thread a path between having all our secrets trivially discoverable and preserving nothing for our later selves for fear of that discovery.

Do I have a reasonable expectation of privacy in any information that I share with a company? My Google searches? The emails I send? Do I have a reasonable expectation of privacy in anything but maybe a letter I hand deliver to my wife?

Since Snowden went public, companies such as Apple and Google - two of the world's most valuable companies - have incorporated much greater encryption into their products and have also been at pains to show that they will not go along with U.S. government demands to access their encrypted products.

I don't believe in privacy. I mean, I like the idea of privacy, but I don't believe that it happens anymore. I think privacy is something, I am afraid, we seem to be waving goodbye to.

The use of encrypted communication and data storage to shield terrorist coordination from intelligence and law-enforcement authorities is known as 'going dark.'

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.

To be sure, anonymity online has it uses and is very important. Governments hoover up people's telephone and e-mail records without oversight, and companies track astonishingly granular personal information.

The stakes in the encryption debate are high, with significant consequences for personal privacy, the U.S. private sector, and our national security.

Paradoxically, in its quest to make Americans more secure, the NSA has made American communications less secure; it has undermined the safety of the entire internet.

The internet has to be protected from intrusive monitoring or else the medium upon which we all rely for the basis of our economy and our normal life, we'll lose that, and it's going to have broad effects as a consequence that we cannot predict.

CISPA permits, but does not require, entities that have been attacked to voluntarily share their knowledge of a cyber threat with each other and with government.

Particularly over the last few decades, technological innovation has offered opportunities to bring people and nations together - but it has also created significant new challenges to law enforcement.

The Internet has made us richer, freer, connected and informed in ways its founders could not have dreamt of. It has also become a vector of attack, espionage, crime and harm.

Remember the early days of the Net, when everything was going to be open and free, and we were all going to share information in a techno-utopia? That was great until people realized that their user data could be turned into gold. Now there are billions at stake, and nobody is playing nice anymore.

We all want safe, secure, private data, but we also want safe and secure communities. And we can have both. I really do believe that.

I think over time more people will become more aware of how vulnerable their data is.

With original cryptography, you are just trying to secure one narrow thing - say, communications - and you are trying to secure it from a third party. But you can't secure it from the party you are talking to if they forward your email; it doesn't matter how well your email is encrypted.