Esther Dyson Quotes

The Internet's distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom.

I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom.

It's very difficult for governments to dominate the Internet because it's so difficult to control. People want to be free. People want to hear multiple voices. They want to make their own decisions. And people who see things will report things.

The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It’s as simple as that

Much of the civil rights work of this century will entail championing digital rights.

Online censorship, mass and targeted surveillance and data collection, digital attacks on civil society and repression resulting from online expression force individuals around the world to seek security to hold opinions without interference and seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Many seek to protect their security through encryption, the scrambling of data so only intended recipients may access it

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom.

We must all rise to the challenge to demonstrate that security and prosperity in the Internet age are not only compatible with liberty, they ultimately depend on it.

I do most of my business on that dirty Internet that you were just talking about, where I find there is a lot of freedom to report exactly what I want.

Even in democratic society, we don't have good answers how to balance the need for security on one hand and the protection of free speech on the other in our digital networks.

Internet freedom is not possible without freedom from fear, and users will not be free from fear unless they are sufficiently protected from online theft and attack.

We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves.

Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom.

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

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

Efforts to constrain encryption through forms of extraordinary access will inevitably introduce vulnerabilities into the security of consumer products in ways that are likely to have adverse long-term effects on the security, privacy, and civil liberties of citizens.

The rights that people have offline must also be protected online.

The argument about the need to regulate the digital space has to be weighed against freedom of expression in our society, whether we are interacting in a virtual world or in the real world where we have the growth of so-called 'safe spaces.'

What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model?

A governing ethos of the Internet has been that whatever flows through it - information, ideas - is up for grabs.

The Internet should be an open platform where you are free to go where you want and say and do what you want without having to ask anyone's permission.

The first thing is - and this is very important - I support the unmonitored use of the Internet for everyone. It doesn't matter what country you're in or what you do for a living - everyone should have the right to an unmonitored Internet.