James Comey Quotes

If we give up all our privacy rights, have we become any safer?

Privacy isn't negotiable. It's the right of every American.

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.

Just because technological advances have made it easier for the federal government to collect information doesn't mean that our privacy rights can or should be violated on the ground or in the air.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.

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.

The U.S. Constitution protects our privacy from the prying eyes of government. It does not, however, protect us from the prying eyes of companies and corporations.

Secrecy at the level of the individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret.

If you are an American, you can understand why people cannot go through your house and go through your files. By the same token, should they be able to go through them electronically?

Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.

Ironically, one of the clearer threats to consumer privacy is the government's largely unchecked ability to collect your sensitive information without due process.

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

Privacy may actually be an anomaly.

Personal privacy is a closely held American value.

I suspect privacy is a very new concept to humanity.

Privacy is not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution as freedom of speech is in the First Amendment.

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.

I believe that it is critical for this country to have a zone of privacy —– for everyone,

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 issue of wiretapping raises the issue of the balance between human liberty and the requirements of national security. I would say that the weight should be on the side of human liberty and that if human liberty is ever to be infringed, the demonstration on the national security side must be overwhelming.

Americans don’t need a big government to read their e-mail and track what else they do

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

The evidence does not support the proposition that there is a significant measure of safety that is added as a result of collecting all these records on law abiding Americans.

… the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information.