Tom Cotton Quotes

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.

What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA's own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.

Despite being in public life, I value my own privacy immensely and would be as concerned as anyone else if I thought my mobile phone records could be easily available to officials across government.

We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.

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

One can doubt the sincerity of the technology community’s outrage over the NSA’s surveillance practices—doubt, for example, that the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company reportedly stores petabytes’ worth of data about its billion-plus active monthly users, was shocked at the thought of mass data collection.

I'm not for the mass collection of data. I go the other way.

To be sure, anonymity online has it uses and is very important. Governments hoover up people's telephone and e-mail records without oversight, and companies track astonishingly granular personal information.

If your plumber or pool installer or local appliance store uses HubSpot software, HubSpot may be holding information about you without you even knowing it. We figure we're safe when we use online services. We figure we can trust the people who run them not to snoop on us. I used to believe that. I don't anymore.

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'm very, very worried about the invasion of privacy rights that we're seeing not only from the N.S.A. and the government but from corporate America, as well. We're losing our privacy rights. It's a huge issue.

We live in what's called an open society, which of course means they open our emails, open our phone records, and open our medical records.

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

The [Edward] Snowden disclosures created this perception that people's privacy was being put at significant risk.

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

The TSA tears through your bags at the airport and the NSA watches what books you buy and what you say over the telephone and online. It doesn't feel like anything is private anymore.

Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.

In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

Whatever Tencent can see, the Chinese government can see.

As long as government is allowed to collect all Internet data, the perceived exigency will drive honest civil servants to reach more broadly and deeply into our networked lives.

Supercookies are legal, but I don't think they should be.

You already have zero privacy - get over it.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

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