Bob Beckel Quotes

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

I want to stand up and cheer until I realize what he told me was all the great things about my privacy except that he really told me between the lines is that he is going to continue to collect all my private records without a warrant.

I believe there is significant overreach by the NSA in how it monitors American citizens.

The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.

In America, after 9/11, and after the death of bin Laden, and after two wars, one of them fought, a lot of people think, on false pretenses, and definitely post the Patriot Act, there are a lot of these questions about what can we do to our citizens in order to prevent the next attack.

How will we defend ourselves if the Patriot Act expires? Well, perhaps we could just rely on the Constitution and demonstrate exactly how traditional judicial warrants can gather all the info we need - and how bulk collection really hasn't worked.

There isn’t any doubt that in fighting the War on Terrorism you increase the power and scope of government, and it becomes more intrusive.

Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

The NSA surveillance programs have crossed the line of proportionality. Even if one could conceivably justify the initial inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders, their continued storage in Government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how the information will be used in the future?

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

To say the U.S. government is targeting U.S. persons, to listen to their phone calls and read their emails, is just false.

You've got the NSA doing all this collecting of material on all of its citizens - that's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did.

The revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing data on countless law-abiding American citizens has aroused great concern about the potential threat such an effort poses to liberty.

Nobody ever was fired for 9/11. Instead of firing the people who didn't do a good job, we gave them medals. The guy who did a good job, I don't know what happened to him. And what we did was we decided we'd just collect everybody's information. That we'd sort of scrap the Bill of Rights.

People talk about the Patriot Act that was passed immediately in the wake of September 11. What the Patriot Act did was break down the walls between the various agencies.

The Patriot Act is essential to our continued success in the war on terror here at home.

In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.

The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone's communications.

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

Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?

We've got the NSA getting logs of every call you make. The IRS is weaponized like Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.