Ron Wyden Quotes

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about.

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.

No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.

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

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

What you did do with your grocery card, discount card is much more invasive to your privacy than what the NSA does.

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.

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 key question: will the NSA continue to monitor hundreds of millions of people without any suspicion? Under Obama's proposals: Yes.

Corporate and government surveillance aren't separate; they're an alliance of interests.

I think it's a mistake to downgrade and say surveillance is no big deal. It is a huge deal that we are collecting millions of Americans phone calls and that someone can go to a keyboard and put your name in and search it without a warrant.

It's casual Friday, which means that at the White House, they're casually going through everybody's phone calls and records.

You're gonna check my computer records? Is that important? I don't think the government needs to know how I feel about teen Asian sluts in order to fight terrorism.

To trust so much in our devices and sync everyone's device up - we tell people where we are, what we buy and where we shop, who we talk to - and that goes somewhere. The ghost of information technology out there, and one of the points... of the manga and anime was trusting in technology.

One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy.

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

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.

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.

The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.

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!

We have to examine very carefully any privacy-reducing technology.

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.

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances.

We signed up for Showtime, which I think put us on a Homeland Security list somewhere.