Global Monitoring Quotes

The NSA is already bugging everything that everybody does. Each time there's a new revelation from Snowden, you realise the extent of it.

…in time of peace the bulk of intelligence can be obtained through overt channels… It can also be obtained…through the many Americans, business and professional men and American residents of foreign countries, who are naturally and normally brought in touch with what is going on in those countries.

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.

I think it could be the biggest information problem that we face. 'If somebody is abroad and they even mention the name of an American citizen, bang, off goes the tap, and no more information is collected.

If Iran cheats, the world will know it.

What the UN inspectors can do is demonstrate to the world, help the Iraqi government demonstrate to the world that the Iraqis are cooperatively disarming if that is in fact what the Iraqi government decides to do.

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.

There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world.

What we revealed is that this spying system is devoted not to terrorists, but is directed to innocent people around the world. None of this has anything to do with terrorism. Is Angela Merkel a terrorist?

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?

Our intelligence agencies will continue to gather information about the intentions of governments - as opposed to ordinary citizens - around the world, in the same way that the intelligence services of every other nation does. We will not apologize simply because our services may be more effective.

But by providing the background picture - the universal situational awareness that we desire - by showing the anomalies, the Space-Based Radar will change the nature of how we do our analysis and our intelligence.

So when Putin goes out to buy a Coke, thirty seconds later it is known in Washington DC.

The open source nature of the Internet is both a blessing and a curse, because just as much as we can watch what's happening around the world, we can also be watched.

What is sure is that the satellite view of our world and its evolution is now a common reality.

Scientists use satellites to track weather, map ice sheet melting, detect diseases, show ecosystem change... the list goes on and on. I think nearly every scientific field benefits or could benefit from satellite imagery analysis.

We have lots of challenges around the world, and I have no doubt the intelligence community will continue to watch them, monitor them, and report on them. The issue is, with all of our other distractions here in Washington, particularly, will the appropriate attention be paid to each one of these issues?

One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.

Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world's information goes through little tubes under the ocean. Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world.

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

Space enables a higher degree of transparency, it's hard to hide from space-based assets.

In the United States and some of the other countries involved it's sort of a "five eyes" global spying alliance. That's the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. They've had a little bit of a more muscular public response. Now, they haven't been satisfying or really meaningful in any country yet. But they have been engaging.