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.
Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.
The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.
The NSA is already bugging everything that everybody does. Each time there's a new revelation from Snowden, you realise the extent of it.
Suspicionless surveillance has no place in a democracy. The next 60 days are a historic opportunity to rein in the NSA, but the only one who can end the worst of its abuses is you. Call your representatives and tell them that the unconstitutional 'bulk collection' of Americans' private records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act must end.
[Bill] Binney designed ThinThread, an NSA program that used encryption to try to make mass surveillance less objectionable. It would still have been unlawful and unconstitutional.
I think what we've had in the past is the government has said, "Well, we need to collect the whole haystack." And the haystack is Americans' privacy. Every Americans' privacy. We have to give up all of our privacy.
No one in their right mind can say to me with a straight face that the Patriot Act has not aggregated the Fourth Amendment.
When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control.
This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect.
Look at it this way: this administration is taking unprecedented steps to make sure that the government's secrets remain private while simultaneously invading the privacy of its citizens... Many innocents must be violated so that a few guilty people can be stopped. It's a digital stop-and-frisk.
Obama's respect for the Constitution does not apply to protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as Obama's deeply intrusive National Security Agency programs prove.
Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
If the FBI gets the 'back doors' it wants, Internet services would be required to create a massive online infrastructure for law enforcement to spy on members of the public.
There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world.
The Snowden leaks did cause damage.
I wish I could say I was shocked at the reports the NSA is secretly spying on the private phone calls of millions of Verizon customers. However, this is a predictable result of a government that continues to erode our liberties while promising some glimmering hope of security.
Whether you breach the Fourth Amendment 20 percent of the time or 100 percent of the time, it's still not the point. The point is whether or not you still collect millions of people's information with a single warrant.
Richard Nixon got kicked out of Washington for tapping one hotel suite. Today we're tapping every American citizen in the country, and no one has been put on trial for it or even investigated. We don't even have an inquiry into it.
The NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times a year since Congress gave it broad new powers in 2008.
The fourth amendment specifically was designed to prohibit general warrants. How could collecting every piece of phone data be perceived as anything but a general warrant?
In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Smith v. Maryland that a few days' worth of phone records for a single individual were not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The NSA today, though, collects hundreds of millions of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans without an individualized warrant.
The Snowden leaks were important – a legitimate scoop – and we might never have known about the NSA’s law breaking if it had not been for them.
