Quotes About Nsa Surveillance

“The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.”

— Edward Snowden

“Post-9/11 surveillance has caused writers to self-censor. They avoid writing about and researching certain subjects; they're careful about communicating with sources, colleagues, or friends abroad. A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the first Snowden articles were published found that people didn't want to talk about the NSA online. A broader Harris poll found that nearly half of Americans have changed what they research, talk about, and write about because of NSA surveillance.”

— Bruce Schneier

“The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge.”

— Barton Gellman

“As digital communications have multiplied, and NSA capabilities with them, the agency has shifted resources from surveillance of individual targets to the acquisition of communications on a planetary scale.”

— Barton Gellman

“NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.”

— Barton Gellman

“The NSA routinely receives-or intercepts-routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the United States before they are delivered to the international customers. The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal, and sends them on.”

— Glenn Greenwald

“I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.”

— Glenn Greenwald

“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.”

— John Conyers

“In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government - as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance - people feel powerless.”

— Jay Parini

“With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.”

— Jay Parini

“I think this mass surveillance by the NSA was never about terrorism: It's all about economic spying & social control. It's all about POWER.”

— Ziad K. Abdelnour

“Part of what we're trying to do is lay out what really happened. For example, I've been trying to get across that the intelligence leadership did not just keep the country in the dark. They actively misled the country on key issues. When you have someone who heads the NSA saying we don't hold data at all on US citizens, that's one of the most misleading statements I believe that's ever been made about surveillance policy. And I think that now we're starting to get that message across.”

— Ron Wyden

“The most striking thing Snowden has revealed is the depth of what the NSA and the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the US] are doing, their hunger for all data, for total bulk dragnet surveillance where they try to collect all communications and do it all sorts of different ways. Their ethos is "collect it all."”

— Laura Poitras

“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.”

— Edward Snowden

“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.”

— Edward Snowden

“A big factor is that the enthusiast camp's values are really rooted in Silicon Valley and in these supposedly new business models. But again, I think this such an interesting moment because things like the NSA revelations are really forcing people to recognize the connections between corporate and government surveillance.”

— Astra Taylor

“The domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition. The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism. Accepting that bargain enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom - "he who does not move does not notice his chains," observed Rosa Luxemburg - but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.”

— Glenn Greenwald

“Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations”

— Glenn Greenwald

“What we need to do, is restore those tools that have been taken away by the president [Barack Obama] and others, restore those tools to the NSA and to our entire surveillance and law enforcement community.”

— Chris Christie

“As our voices rise in protest, the NSA monitors your every phone call. if you have a cell phone, you are under surveillance. I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damn business,”

— Rand Paul