Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes

There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens' every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.

Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an e-mail, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace, and the Government has decided that it's good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you've never been suspected of doing a crime.

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

I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.

What we have now in America is a surveillance society.

The Orwellian vision was about state-sponsored surveillance. Now it's not just the state, it's your nosy neighbor, your ex-spouse and people who want to spam you.

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it - whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.

Every single means of communication amongst the public, the government has antennae into, to find out who is liable to be sympathetic and who is not liable to be sympathetic, and I think this has probably been going on since all channels of communication began.

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

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.

The world is going to come to a place where we're all being spied on and nothing is private.

The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

We've become the most eavesdropped, monitored, spied on, photographed population in human history, dwarfing anything that was done by the Stasi state and East Germany. And that's all been - you know, these are all the sacrifices that we supposedly have to make to make ourselves safe.

This is not some alarmist Orwellian scenario; it is here, now, financed by $20 billion last year and $15 billion more this year of federal money appropriated out of sheer fear. By creating the means to monitor 300 million visits to the United States yearly, this administration and a supine opposition are building a system capable of identifying, tracking and spying on 300 million Americans.

Corporate and government surveillance aren't separate; they're an alliance of interests.

We have to call mass surveillance mass surveillance. We can't let governments around the world redefine, and sort of weasel their way out of it by saying this is bulk collection.

Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.

I know that my cell phone in Iran... is bugged, and they listen in, and my emails, I'm sure, are monitored inside Iran. They have my email address; it's not like they can't snoop on it.

Let me make this very clear: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, our digital exhaust is being sucked up by the government. It is being compiled on big server farms and it's being analyzed by different computer programs, looking for any hint that you and I are up to no good.

It's really weird watching the government watch me.

What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

You can't assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible.

As it turns out, American-made technology had helped Mubarak and his security state collect, compile, and parse vast amounts of data about everyday citizens.