David S. Addington Quotes

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.

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.

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?

Since the first Patriot Act, as this has evolved, more and more of the privacy of Americans is disappearing. And that’s going to hurt us; it’s not going to make us safer.

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

Congress passed the deeply flawed Patriot Act and authorized the invasion of Iraq. It even gave its retroactive approval to warrantless wiretapping.

I would have never signed the Patriot Act. I would have never signed the National Defense Authorization Act allowing for arrests and detainment of you and me as U.S. citizens without being charged.

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.

It's hard to have that debate around secret programs authorized by secret legal opinions issued by a secret court. Actually, it's impossible to have that debate.

The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.

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.

Say what you will about Americans, but one thing they are not is passive. The Bush administration may have pushed through the Patriot Act weeks after 11 September, but, as the American public got to grips with how the law was affecting their individual rights, their protests grew loud and angry.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used that tragic event as a justification to rip up our constitution and our civil liberties. And I honestly believe that one or two 9/11s, and martial law will be declared in our country and we're inching towards a police state.

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

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.

If we had known that one of those terrorist attacks was coming, could our government have electronically eavesdropped on the attackers without a warrant?

September 11 was just an excuse to expand the Patriot Act. Legislation which had been proposed for years just got stuck in.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

Secrecy at the level of the individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret.

Plaintiffs have a very significant expectation of privacy in an aggregated collection of their telephony metadata covering the last five years …. the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature…. The program infringes of that degree of privacy that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.

Those who are troubled by our existing programs are not interested in repeating the tragedy of 9-11. And those who defend these programs are not dismissive of civil liberties. The challenge is getting the details right and that is not simple.

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

The Snowden leaks were important – a legitimate scoop – and we might never have known about the NSA’s law breaking if it had not been for them.

[The FBI v. Apple Case] threatens a radical transformation of the relationship between the government and the governed.

Imagine a libertarian president challenging Congress to repeal the PATRIOT Act.