L. Neil Smith Quotes

I will not counter the insanity of the PATRIOT Act with an overblown fear of my rights being taken away.

We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.

Today it is becoming harder to speak out, with the inception of the Patriot Act, the president has legislated free speech to be a crime.

It doesn’t keep us safe and it doesn’t keep us free if we give up our liberties to the government.

Homeland security intelligence done the wrong way will give us thought police.

We encounter the dilemma of freedom versus authority in all sorts of places but probably nowhere more frequently than in the area of Big Brother's ongoing efforts to protect us from ourselves – efforts that many people view as an invasion of their privacy or as infringement upon their God-given right to be stupid (though they don't usually put it that way).

Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state - the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.

I realize there are a lot of folks in my political party who disagree with me on this, but I think the Patriot Act is an important law enforcement tool, and it makes our country safer.

We have less civil liberties than we had on 9/ 1 1 in some significant ways. But we are also, I believe, less safe as a result in many instances of the sacrifice in human rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law that (the Bush) administration has adopted.

For too long, opponents of the PATRIOT Act have transformed this law into a grossly distorted caricature that bears no relation to the legislation itself.

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.

We must protect the very things that make America so special - most certainly including our civil liberties. But we cannot do so without strong national security and a thoughtful and informed discourse.

With the death of bin Laden, it's finally time for Congress to bring back the pre-9-11 legal norm, before we decided it was okay to toss out our civil liberties if the 'bad guys' were scary enough.

The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.

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.

The last thing the Department of Homeland Security is about is infringing on anybody's constitutionally protected rights.

We want our government to protect us, to make sure something like 9/11 never happens again. We quickly moved to give law enforcement more power to do this. But that now begs the question, did we move to fast? Did we give too much power away? I don't have the answer.

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.

This thing called Patriot Act, through which we abdicated a lot of our civil rights to defend the country against terrorism, it's a four-year story.

It's so interesting that when I finished 'The X-Files' in 2002, the - call it the political and cultural climate in America - was one of fear, and trust of government. Because we put ourselves in the hands of the authority who was going to protect us. And, you know, we gave up a lot of our liberties to Homeland Security, etc.

America will be far safer if we reduce the chances of a terrorist attack in one of our cities than if we diminish the civil liberties of our own people.

In a sad twist of fate, the bill to reauthorize the Patriot Act was debated on the floor of the House of Representatives the same day that terrorists struck again.

No one in their right mind can say to me with a straight face that the Patriot Act has not aggregated the Fourth Amendment.

I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.

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.