John Dean Quotes

When the 'New York Times' revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous.

The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.

How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We're supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties.

We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious FISA court

To say the U.S. government is targeting U.S. persons, to listen to their phone calls and read their emails, is just false.

On his own okay, Bush has authorized eavesdropping on as many as a thousand people over the past three years, with some of those intercepts being purely domestic, the New York Times reported.

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

Quietly, President Obama has done warrantless wire tapping. And it was hardly covered. I don't know if any of the mainstream press bothered to cover it.

The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency.

To those in the executive branch who say ‘just trust us’ when it comes to secret and warrantless surveillance of domestic communications, I say, ‘Remember your history.’

Has President Bush exceeded his constitutional authority or acted illegally in authorizing wiretaps without a warrant? Benjamin Franklin would not have thought so.

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

Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

That's not how national security works... I don't care what the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we the private citizens!

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

I really think the Patriot Act violates our Constitution. It was, it is, an illegal act. The Congress, the Senate and the president cannot change the Constitution.

The president overstepped his authority when he asked the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls without obtaining a warrant.

Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy.

Civil libertarians have raised concerns that some of the Patriot Act's provisions infringe on Constitutional rights. Those concerns are not supported by the facts.

There is not a syllable in the Constitution that gives the federal government the right to spy on civilians.

We should outlaw all wiretapping—public and private, wherever and whenever it occurs, except when the security of the nation itself is at stake—and then only with the strictest safeguards.

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.

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

Though many will criticize the president for mis-steps in Iraq and at home, it is with the complicity of Congress that we have become a nation of pre-emptive war, secret military tribunals, torture, rejection of habeas corpus, warrantless searches, undue government secrecy, extraordinary renditions, and uncontrolled spying on the American people. Fighting over there has nothing to do with preserving freedoms here at home. More likely the opposite is true.