Surveillance Quotes

We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government. (William O. Douglas)
To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe. View quote
Agnes Smedley
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. View quote
Edward Snowden
No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused. View quote
Edward Snowden
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy. View quote
Theodor Adorno
Who wants to live to be a hundred What's the point of it A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution and perpetual medical surveillance. View quote
Henry Miller
The Sage of Toronto... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity. View quote
Guy Debord
I have been placed under surveillance, and I can't take a step without it being known to the Polish minister of internal affairs. View quote
Konstantin Rokossovsky
History leaved no doubt that collective coercion and control is both the intent and effect of state surveillance. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication. (Barry Eisler)
One of the downsides of being famous is that folks pay far more attention to you than they should. American celebrities are constantly under surveillance, and every word they say is subject to scrutiny. So, be careful what you wish for if you desire fame. No human being should be a goldfish. View quote
Bill O'Reilly
In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks. View quote
Evgeny Morozov
The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world. View quote
Jeffrey Toobin
There is no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the president is openly violating our nation's laws by authorizing the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. View quote
John Conyers
Incidentally, our railroad facilities are under video surveillance by the federal police. However, the federal and state governments will have to determine whether video surveillance shouldn't be significantly expanded to a certain degree. View quote
Otto Schily
I worked with the March of Dimes to enact legislation for a national birth defects prevention program to provide surveillance, research and preventive services aimed at reducing the rate of birth defects. View quote
Solomon Ortiz
Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror? View quote
Cory Doctorow
The irony is that Barack Obama would not even be president if it were not for the courage of persecuted dissidents such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, spied upon by their own government. But Obama understands where power lies. It does not lie with the citizen. It lies with Wall Street and our corporate boardrooms, which have carried out a slow motion coup d'état. And a system of mass surveillance is designed to keep these elites in these boardrooms powerful and the rest of us powerless. View quote
Chris Hedges
WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency, their surveillance programs and their interference in foreign elections...And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden, who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow... View quote
Chris Hedges
An omnipresent surveillance state ... makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state. (Chris Hedges)
In recognising the global problem posed by osteoporosis, WHO sees the need for a global strategy for prevention and control of osteoporosis, focusing on three major functions: prevention, management and surveillance. View quote
Gro Harlem Brundtland
The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities that we've ever seen in history. Now, what they will argue, is that they don't use this for nefarious purposes against American citizens. In some ways, that's true but the real problem is that they're using these capabilities to make us vulnerable to them and then saying, 'well I have a gun pointed at your head. I'm not going to pull the trigger. Trust me. View quote
Edward Snowden
I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building. View quote
Edward Snowden
The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America. View quote
Edward Snowden