Intelligence Abuse Quotes

Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable.

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

I am concerned that the vague guidelines and policies used by the NSA for intelligence collection and sharing, in conjunction with elusive direction from the Administration, have led to intelligence being collected on sitting members of Congress for political purposes.

I am troubled... that someone would sell a book, trading on their former service as a government insider with access to our nation's most valuable intelligence, in order to profit from the suffering that this nation endured on September 11, 2001.

Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.

Our intelligence agencies have vast powers, and Obama used them illegally to spy on political opponents. This can't be allowed to stand.

Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.

The Russians win when we allow our intelligence community to be politicized, when we allow political opposition research to function as a basis for a warrant to spy on American citizens.

If you have got high-ranking officials reaching down five levels in the bureaucracy to drag an analyst up to their office to berate them and threaten their jobs because they don't like the conclusions about an intelligence matter, that, in my view, is dangerous.

For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense.