surveillance laws Quotes

Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

I do think that when you go into red states, they're - so-called red states - I think they're troubled with certain excesses with respect to the Patriot Act, but they're also concerned with making sure we're secure against terrorism.

While Congress saw some need to loosen the standard in the initial days of a war, it wanted the president to comply with FISA in carrying out surveillance in the United States.

U.S. intelligence has the legal right to monitor foreign communications as they go through to U.S. service providers. However, even though something is legal doesn't make it right. I'm not American; I don't really care about what data is being collected about American citizens. I'm worried about us, the foreigners.

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers - and not to tell you about it.

It's very, very difficult I think for us to have a transparent debate about secret programs approved by a secret court issuing secret court orders based on secret interpretations of the law.

I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts. Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many.

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.

You're gonna check my computer records? Is that important? I don't think the government needs to know how I feel about teen Asian sluts in order to fight terrorism.

We must continue to be diligent in protecting Americans' civil liberties while preserving critical law enforcement tools we need to keep America safe.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

We have been through four and five generations of technology since the PATRIOT Act.

Many of our ally states don't have these constitutional protections - in the UK, in New Zealand, in Australia. They've lost the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. All of those countries, in the wake of these surveillance revelations, rushed through laws that were basically ghostwritten by the National Security Agency to enable mass surveillance without court oversight, without all of the standard checks and balances that one would expect.

We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties.

We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.

I will also continue to strongly oppose any reauthorization of the Patriot Act that does not protect the rights and freedoms of law-abiding Americans with no connection to terrorism.

We should craft our laws to allow images of criminal suspects to be captured in public - but also to make sure that the government does not unduly infringe on the privacy rights of innocent citizens.

We need to gather intelligence, but we need to do so legally.

I was appointed U.S. attorney by President [George] Bush on September 10th, 2001, and the world changed enormously the next day, and that happened in my state.I will make no apologies, ever, for protecting the lives and the safety of the American people. We have to give more tools to our folks to be able to do that, not fewer, and then trust those people and oversee them to do it the right way.

By tearing down the wall between law enforcement and the intelligence community, we have been able to share information in a way that was virtually impossible before the Patriot Act.

I don't believe the federal government should be snooping into American citizens' cell phones without a warrant issued by a federal judge. You cannot give the federal government extraordinary powers to eavesdrop without a warrant. It's simply un-American.

The Patriot Act makes a mockery of the Sixth Amendment, which protects your right to a speedy and public trial, and your right to the assistance of counsel for your defense.

The United States need to put internet processes, policies, and procedures in place with real laws that forbid going beyond the borders of what's reasonable to ensure that the only time that we and other countries around the world exercise these authorities are when it is absolutely necessary.

The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.

We do have to balance this issue of privacy and security. Those who pretend that there's no balance that has to be struck and think we can take a 100-percent absolutist approach to protecting privacy don't recognize that governments are going to be under an enormous burden to prevent the kinds of terrorist acts that not only harm individuals, but also can distort our society and our politics in very dangerous ways.