Wiretapping Quotes

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.

There is no fear exception to the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

There is not a single Supreme Court case that insinuates that the President can violate a federal statute in order to gather foreign intelligence. It was a flagrant violation of The Constitution.

There used to be technological limitations … that provided a measure of privacy for Americans. Now with essentially no technological limitations—the technology can practically do anything—the only way to strike the appropriate balance between liberty and security is to embed that balance in the law.

Privacy matters. Privacy allows us to determine who we are and what we want to be.

What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that.

Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable.

Governmental officials -- including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law --have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law. The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities

When people think of the American Identity, they don’t think of torture, they don’t think of illegal wiretapping … or many of the other things that have been happening in the last 6 years…. Singers are like the canary in the coal mine. When things are happening, they must be sung out.

Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft—they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud and even if you just send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. They give NSA direct access that they don’t oversee so that they can’t be held libel for it.

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

Those who are troubled by our existing programs are not interested in repeating the tragedy of 9-11. And those who defend these programs are not dismissive of civil liberties. The challenge is getting the details right and that is not simple.

It's interesting in this day and age to do a film about political espionage and wiretapping. I don't think that those types of secrets that J. Edgar Hoover was able to obtain and keep for such a long period of time would be possible in today's world, with the Internet and WikiLeaks.

The author of our constitution, James Madison, … would be aghast

Also, with information having just come out at the time about J. Edgar Hoover's electronic surveillance of Dr. King, it gave greater weight to the statements of those persons who were alleging involvement of the FBI.

The 'FISA Amendments Act' would gut the oversight system established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which subjected domestic spying to review by a special intelligence court.

The issue of wiretapping raises the issue of the balance between human liberty and the requirements of national security. I would say that the weight should be on the side of human liberty and that if human liberty is ever to be infringed, the demonstration on the national security side must be overwhelming.

I've been watching The Wire recently.

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

Everything I say and do, I assume that I am being spied on.

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.

When I cleared out Moscow apartment after stepping down as president, they found all kinds of wiring in the walls. It turned out that they had been spying on me all along.

You really can’t have a democracy if the government knows the content of every conversation between journalists and their sources. You can’t have a democracy with that kind of surveillance going on.

The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier, and the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months.