Phil Zimmermann Quotes

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

Unfettered discretion [in obtaining information could] alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.

Those are possibilities for technology, which don't tend to be used, because of the way power is concentrated. There are all kinds of possibilities, including for coercion. In China, technology is used to control and coerce. Here too, to an extent, but not to that extent.

One thing about a police state, you can always find the police.

The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom".

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

The government continues to erode our freedom.

In the 1980s, in the communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.

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.

Whatever Tencent can see, the Chinese government can see.

As a rule, governments monitor people.

We may have government surveillance people listening in on Quaker anti-war meetings.

It is the work of the state to think for the people and plan for the people.

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

Surveillance is just getting too easy right now. And this is only because of technology..

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

The Yazidis can no longer count on being left to their own devices. With the rise of far-reaching government bureaucracies and modern technologies, there are now fewer places where a people can hide.

What is to stop the government from demanding that Apple write code to turn on the microphone [of a user's iPhone] in aid of government surveillance, activate the video camera, surreptitiously record conversations, or turn on location services to track the phone’s user? Nothing.

The sacrifice of our personal liberty for security is and will forever be a false choice.

Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.

We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

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.