Malcolm Wallop Quotes

Introducing ID cards isn't a matter of great national security importance.

I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test.

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 say the phone records of law abiding citizens are none of their damn business!

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

You talked about national identity cards and the terrorism bill. We have made a government that has grown used to viewing us as subjects, has grown used to seeing its role as commanding us.

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

Bringing an end to mass government surveillance needs to be a central pillar of returning to the principles we have put in jeopardy in the early 21st century.

The very controversial National Identification Act of 1991, requiring all United States citizens to carry identification, has greatly enhanced the ability of law enforcement officers to identify criminals and terrorists.

In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government - as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance - people feel powerless.

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

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

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?

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

I’d rather risk being a terrorists victim than live under a surveillance state.

No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused.

In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.

I'm witnessing the problems that the federal government is passing down in terms of drones, in violation of our civil liberties, spying on our citizens, death panels in the form of the government taking over the health care system and the national debt they're just saddling our grandchildren with.

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 domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition. The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism. Accepting that bargain enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom - "he who does not move does not notice his chains," observed Rosa Luxemburg - but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.

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.

The government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from cyber-snooping, but we're not.

We are going to have a long period where people are accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment.

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.

This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect.