Ted Cruz Quotes

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!

I'm positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies.

America is way too quick to trade freedom for the illusion of security. Whether it's allowing the NSA to go way too far in what it intercepts of our personal data, to our government monitoring of everything domestically and spending way more than we should.

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

I'm very grateful that Barack Obama as president very much put protection of privacy on the agenda today, due to the fact of Islamist terrorism all over the world.

The issue I brought forward most clearly was that of mass surveillance, not of surveillance in general.

One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy.

In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.

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.

Now all of us can talk to the NSA — just by dialing any number.

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

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

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.

Opponents of civil liberties contend the NSA data collection has made our country more safe, but even the most vocal defenders of the program have failed to identify a single thwarted plot.

The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities in American history... The real problem is that they're using these capabilities to make us vulnerable.

The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people.

I was thinking about how people were upset about the information that came out from Snowden about the NSA - many people were upset, including myself. But I was kind of surprised by how little we did about it - how little fighting we did.

[A new all-encompassing national identification system] contradicts some of our most sacrosanct American principles of personal liberty and expectations of privacy and is far in excess of what is needed to provide us with the security and protections we all want.

Look at it this way: this administration is taking unprecedented steps to make sure that the government's secrets remain private while simultaneously invading the privacy of its citizens... Many innocents must be violated so that a few guilty people can be stopped. It's a digital stop-and-frisk.

If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government's been hiding.

The government has investigated our program of collecting through a generalized fashion, everyone's phone records in the country. And they found that no terrorist case has been thwarted through this.

I was aware of it but I think I was aware of it abstractly, theoretically. You know I understood who Edward Snowden was and what he did but I didn't really see the relevance that it bore in my life and doing film changed that tune pretty quick.

It's becoming less and less the National Security Agency and more and more the national surveillance agency. It's gaining more offensive powers with each passing year.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now [with Barack Obama].