Privacy Violations Quotes

There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.

Privacy violations should be considered criminal offences.

I think it's a mistake to downgrade and say surveillance is no big deal. It is a huge deal that we are collecting millions of Americans phone calls and that someone can go to a keyboard and put your name in and search it without a warrant.

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.

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 laws are still very unclear. Cells are still taken from people without consent - a lot of people don't realize it.

I never thought I'd see the day when the U.S. government could listen in on phone conversations or read private mail without first obtaining a warrant from a court. That sounds more like something that happened in the Soviet Union.

How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We're supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties.

I think we're probably only about halfway through the number of revelations. I'm pretty certain there will be quite detailed stuff on other uses of covert surveillance. I suspect that emails will be the next scandal. And devices that track people moving around. That's just starting to come out.

The Olympics start on Friday, and Russia is implementing the most intensive security in Olympics history. During the games, the government will monitor every email, every social media message, and listen in on every phone call. In fact, people are even comparing Russia to the United States, that's how bad it is.

Today in Germany, everyone is being watched--even the watchers.

Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.

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.

Lawmakers who support CISA will tell you the bill includes some privacy protections. They're right. But these 'protections' are superficial and include broad loopholes that are so far-reaching as to render the protections meaningless.

Secret courts making secret rulings on secret laws, and companies flagrantly lying to consumers about the insecurity of their products and services, undermine the very foundations of our society.

Martin Luther King was a victim of surveillance, and had great solidarity with victims of surveillance.

The TSA tears through your bags at the airport and the NSA watches what books you buy and what you say over the telephone and online. It doesn't feel like anything is private anymore.

When we think in the context of the last decade's infringements upon personal liberty and the last year's revelations, it's not about surveillance. It's about liberty.

There are just a host of problems born by the electronic age. Things we couldn't even conceive of. I was amused by the analogy that Justice Scalia made in a case about a GPS tracker so you don't know that's being done to your car, is that a violation of your right to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. So Justice Scalia imagines a constable clinging to the bottom of a carriage as it went on its way, so there was some notion that this similar: there is an official eye that's on you, but you don't know about it. Yes, there are all kinds of challenges.

[T]he [Facebook] settlement sends a powerful message about the importance of privacy. The cost of privacy violations like Facebook’s just increased dramatically. And if the need for companies to take privacy commitments seriously was not clear before, it is now.

... privacy is ... connected to a politics of domination.

...what threatens us today in the world of computers and other invasions of privacy is not a national ID card but a number of other things.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

The surveillance revelations are critically important because they revealed that our rights are being redefined in secret, by secret courts that were never intended to have that role - without the consent of the public, without even the awareness of the majority of our political representatives.

I think most Americans are against illegal surveillance of their emails and telephone calls by the government.