Domestic Surveillance Quotes

The CIA and NSA are not supposed to be involved in American law enforcement.

The 'FISA Amendments Act' would gut the oversight system established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which subjected domestic spying to review by a special intelligence court.

During Wilson’s presidency, he followed through on an expansive view of Presidential power, suppressing domestic dissent and subversion in a manner that exceeded Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams.

Ever since 9/11, our intelligence agencies, as part of the 'war on terror,' have expanded their operations to include American citizens. I was 'terrorized' when I learned that the National Security Agency was intercepting information on Americans.

While Congress saw some need to loosen the standard in the initial days of a war, it wanted the president to comply with FISA in carrying out surveillance in the United States.

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.

America is way too quick to trade freedom for the illusion of security. Whether it's allowing the NSA to go way too far in what it intercepts of our personal data, to our government monitoring of everything domestically and spending way more than we should.

The government is keeping detailed records on how many Americans have carports. How many Americans have mold in their bathroom.

The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.

I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

Do you check it when you travel, do you check it when you're just at home? They'd be able to tell something called your 'pattern of life.' When are you doing these kind of activities? When do you wake up? When do you go to sleep? What other phones are around you when you wake up and go to sleep? Are you with someone who's not your wife?

People talk about the Patriot Act that was passed immediately in the wake of September 11. What the Patriot Act did was break down the walls between the various agencies.

Everyone is now considered a potential terrorist, providing a rational for both the government and private corporations to spy on anybody, regardless of whether they have committed a crime. Surveillance is supplemented by a growing domestic army of baton-wielding police forces who are now being supplied with the latest military equipment.

In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.

After 9-11, the President had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead, by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests, President Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country [America], for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.

I do talk to individuals still in the business of tracking individuals in the homeland and abroad. A lot of them have felt that they were hanging on by their fingernails a bit in terms of tracking all the potential threats out there.

A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home.

Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words 'in the United States and' after 'appropriate force' in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas-where we all understood he wanted authority to act-but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

To those in the executive branch who say ‘just trust us’ when it comes to secret and warrantless surveillance of domestic communications, I say, ‘Remember your history.’

If we are to assess the rationality of government expenditures to protect the lives of Americans through massive domestic surveillance, we need to compare this program to others aimed at saving American lives.

There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were - "a real threat," you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

The domestic war against "terrorists" [code for young protesters] provides new opportunities for major defense contractors and corporations who are becoming more a part of our domestic lives.

It is perfectly clear that people, given no alternative, will choose tyranny over anarchy, because anarchy is the worst tyranny of all... The special nature of liberties is that they can be defended only as long as we still have them. So the very first signs of their erosion must be resisted, whether the issue be domestic surveillance by the Army, so-called preventive detention, or the freedom of corporate television, or that of a campus newspaper.