Tom Stoppard Quotes

What we have now in America is a surveillance society.

Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.

Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

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.

I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored.

We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.

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

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

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

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

The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.

As a rule, governments monitor people.

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's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.

Going to public events and getting searched is not a normal event in a free society. We are growing up with a generation of young people who accept the wand and the metal detector.

Surveillance is just getting too easy right now. And this is only because of technology..

Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin: The anxiety of those surveilled is deeply connected to the anxiety of the surveillers. But the anxiety of the surveillers is generally hard to see; it's hidden in classified documents and delivered in highly coded languages in front of Senate committees.

The whole Big Brother vision of the world is looming large.

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.

People everywhere face the threat of control by government and technology.

Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal.

We've witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security... The America being designed right now won't resemble the America we've been defending... The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls.

The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom".