Government Monitoring Quotes

The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.

Congress’ duty to the voters requires it to monitor how military appropriations are spent and to investigate the army’s failures if it was not willing to investigate itself. What are we to do? Sit idle during all the period that the [Civil] war is in progress?

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

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

To ensure that Singaporeans can take advantage of opportunities, the government should continue to monitor carefully the proportion of foreign students in our education institutions to ensure that the proportion matches the present and future needs of the country, and the Singaporeans are the main beneficiaries of our education policy.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

What the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation. They want to have a perfect record of the last five years of your life, so when you come to their attention, they can know everything about you. I'm not down with that, but [Bill] Binney was trying to create something like that.

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.

We are all today being monitored in advance and in criminal suspicion. And I think that's terrifying, and deeply illiberal as concept. And that's something that we should reject.

Homeland security intelligence done the wrong way will give us thought police.

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

It's really weird watching the government watch me.

It's really hard not to be paranoid when you find out that you've been spied on.

Everything I say and do, I assume that I am being spied on.

No one is murdered in Hungary and there are no illegal arrests, but people have begun again, when they talk to you in a public place looking around to see who's listening. You see that in Slovakia, you're beginning to see that in Poland.

stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.

I knew from the beginning that privacy was going to be a huge issue, especially with regard to applying Total Information Awareness in counterterrorism. Because if the technology development was successful, a logical place to apply it was inside the United States.

I believe that the FBI clearly was concerned, wanted to monitor and disrupt Malcolm X wherever possible.

Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.

As Trotsky didn't exactly say, you may not be interested in electronic snoops, but snoops are interested in you, whether or not you keep Coke's secret recipe on your iPhone.

When I cleared out Moscow apartment after stepping down as president, they found all kinds of wiring in the walls. It turned out that they had been spying on me all along.

The term Big Brother is from George Orwell's book 1984 - where everyone's watched over by a network of cameras called Big Brother. I've never understood why Orwell chose that phrase for somebody watching you all the time. Isn't that more like Creepy Uncle?

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

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

The government can spy on people using their mobile phones while they're with their wives and husbands.