Global Surveillance Quotes

In a global and totalitarian war, intelligence must be global and totalitarian.

It will be the CIA's mission and my own if confirmed to ensure that the agency remains the best in the world at its core mission - collecting what our enemies do not want us to know. In short, the CIA must be the world's premier espionage organization.

Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.

Every intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction, precursor chemicals. The inspectors, over a period of ten years, had managed to gain access to much of those precursor chemicals.

Since 1955, the U.K. has been part of an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Intelligence-sharing is, in itself, commonplace.

We've seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we're seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.

The United States has an unfair advantage, as most of the popular cloud services, search engines, computer and mobile operating systems or web browsers are made by U.S. companies. When the rest of the world uses the net, they are effectively using U.S.-based services, making them a legal target for U.S. intelligence.

We share no data with the government anywhere in the world.

It shouldn't just be Russia we're concerned about, because many countries that are not our friends have been hacking into American accounts across the board.

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany's is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency.

The U.S. can use its control over the dollar and the global financial system to shut down any bank or bank account in the world. It can use its control over Apple and Google to remove apps from the App Store and Google Play.

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.

We have to recognise that rights are being violated. The United Nations actually filed a report that found that that was the case, that mass surveillance is a violation of rights.

Despite the Obama administration's proclaimed commitment to global Internet freedom, the executive branch is not transparent about the types and capabilities of surveillance technologies it is sourcing and purchasing - or about what other governments are purchasing the same technology.

The fact that other countries spy on their own people or spy on each other does not address the fact that the US is engaged in massive, bulk collection to the tune of 70.3 million telecommunications a month in France of perfectly innocent people. That has nothing to do with protecting the United States, and has nothing to do with really gathering any kind of meaningful intelligence on France. It is an overreach ... and I think the other countries are justifiably outraged .... As one of our founders said: Those who choose between liberty and security deserve neither.

CIA will continue to pursue every lead; analyze the information we collect with critical, objective eyes; and brief reliable intelligence to protect U.S. forces deployed around the world.

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

Americans hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

WikiLeaks is the 9/11 of diplomacy.

When America is chasing you, the whole world is chasing you.

I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.

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.