Right of Privacy Quotes

The right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the most valued by civilized men.

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its user’s most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identify thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance.

We should outlaw all wiretapping—public and private, wherever and whenever it occurs, except when the security of the nation itself is at stake—and then only with the strictest safeguards.

Hopefully, the world will not have a lot of different privacy standards requirements--particularly some commonality between the United States and Europe.

T]he Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment.

What is to stop the government from demanding that Apple write code to turn on the microphone [of a user's iPhone] in aid of government surveillance, activate the video camera, surreptitiously record conversations, or turn on location services to track the phone’s user? Nothing.

This right of privacy... is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy…

The idea that you can be totally anonymous in the digital age is increasingly hard to execute.

A right of privacy doesn't emerge from any single part of the Constitution. The right of privacy emerges from the Constitution as a whole.

We've used the power that we have had to listen in to everybody so that we could better promote our agenda

I always knew it'd be difficult to balance the right of privacy and the right of free speech. I think that is a tension that we've seen in court case after court case and law after law. And we always strive to find that right balance.

I want to make it clear … that America is not interested in spying on ordinary citizens.

Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not merely to the individual who carries it.

This right to privacy ... doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold–Griswold was the contraceptive case–and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more ...this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, 'Well, it's my individual freedom.' Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights, older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.

[The FBI v. Apple Case] threatens a radical transformation of the relationship between the government and the governed.

Unfettered discretion [in obtaining information could] alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.

Online censorship, mass and targeted surveillance and data collection, digital attacks on civil society and repression resulting from online expression force individuals around the world to seek security to hold opinions without interference and seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Many seek to protect their security through encryption, the scrambling of data so only intended recipients may access it

no court has ever authorized what the government now seeks, no law supports such unlimited and sweeping use of the judicial process, and the Constitution forbids it.

I could answer that the way you want, but I'd hate myself in the morning.

[T]he [Facebook] settlement sends a powerful message about the importance of privacy. The cost of privacy violations like Facebook’s just increased dramatically. And if the need for companies to take privacy commitments seriously was not clear before, it is now.

Much of the civil rights work of this century will entail championing digital rights.

Some call for efforts to weaken or compromise encryption standards such that only Governments may enjoy access to encrypted communications. However, compromised encryption cannot be kept secret from those with the skill to find and exploit the weak points, whether State or non-State, legitimate or criminal. It is a seemingly universal position among technologists that there is no special access that can be made available only to government authorities, even ones that, in principle, have the public interest in mind. In the contemporary technological environment, intentionally compromising encryption, even for arguably legitimate purposes, weakens everyone’s security online.

The Supreme Court has said that: Marriage is the most important relation in life. Now that's being withheld from the plaintiffs. It is the foundation of society. It is essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness. It's a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights and older than our political parties. One of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause. A right of intimacy to the degree of being sacred. And a liberty right equally available to a person in a homosexual relationship as to heterosexual persons.