Government Access Quotes

If a regular law enforcement agency wants your phone records, all they have to do is issue a subpoena. But now the intelligence agency is not able to quickly gather records and look at them to see who these terrorists are calling.

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.

The frustration of our [The Daily] show is- very much outside any parameters of the media or the government. We don't have access to these people, we don't have access. We don't go to dinners we don't have cocktail parties. We don't you know, you've seen what happens when one of us ends up at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, it doesn't end well.

It's very hard to keep an uncrackable encryption if you share it with the government.

We have never really had absolute privacy with our records or our electronic communications - government agencies have always been able to gain access with appropriate court orders.

I introduced the Transparency in Government Act, a multi-faceted transparency bill that would bring unprecedented access and accountability to the federal government.

I am really close to the Chinese government. And I have a chance to talk to them, listen to them.

We share no data with the government anywhere in the world.

The average guy doesn't have an army of lobbyists and lawyers working on his behalf every day in the White House.

Anyway, it's not true that the authorities cannot access the content of the phone even if there is no back door. When I was at the NSA, we did this every single day, even on Sundays. I believe that encryption is a civic responsibility, a civic duty.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to see it.

I've been invited to the White House about five times. I think the greatest thing would be if they actually invited everybody to the White House every night... they'd just take about 500 people a night. Everybody would just love this country because it's so thrilling to go there. It really is.

I want people to feel like they have access to Congress, that they have access to government.

The American citizen has the right to come to the seat of government to assert any claim he may have upon that government, to transact any business he may have with it, to seek its protection, to share its offices, to engage in administering its functions. He has the right of free access to its seaports, through which all operations of foreign commerce are conducted, to the sub-treasuries, land offices, and courts of justice in the several States.

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.

I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to the terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not. So we don’t have anything to worry about.

I must admit, my old tribe is not unanimous on the view I've taken, but there are other folks like me, other former directors of the NSA who have said building in backdoors universally in Apple or other devices actually is bad for America. I think we can all agree it's bad for American privacy.

I'm not targeting government. I'm not saying hey, I'm closing it because I don't want to give you any data. I'm saying that to protect out customers, we have to encrypt. And a side affect of that is, I don't have the data.

I haven't seen - I haven't heard the arguments that would make that case. And I haven't seen a proposal yet that satisfies the objections. The problem is, you create a key like this, and it can't - it's hard to say that it's going to be hidden. And then it becomes used both by our government in multiple cases, but also it could get out as far as hackers are concerned or other countries.

Some call for efforts to weaken or compromise encryption standards such that only Governments may enjoy access to encrypted communications. However, compromised encryption cannot be kept secret from those with the skill to find and exploit the weak points, whether State or non-State, legitimate or criminal. It is a seemingly universal position among technologists that there is no special access that can be made available only to government authorities, even ones that, in principle, have the public interest in mind. In the contemporary technological environment, intentionally compromising encryption, even for arguably legitimate purposes, weakens everyone’s security online.

There is an energy in the USA that will have to be dealt with, will have to be acknowledged and coped with. There are people who feel that they've lost ground, lost access to government - people whose quality of life has been affected.

China has national security laws that compel Chinese companies to provide the government with information and access at their government's request. And virtually all Chinese companies of any size are required to have Communist Party 'cells' inside them, to make sure the companies stay in line with the party's principles and policies.

There’s an excellent historical reason why Jewish intellectual achievement sits along side political weakness…Jewish achievement in other areas has come at the expense of political strength….Centuries of survival in other peoples’ lands prevented Jews from achieving full acceptance—and access to the levers of government. Some individual Jews have lived large, but the Jewish people as a whole lived on sufferance afraid to antagonize those from whom they sought tolerance.