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Surveillance Quotes

Browse 370 quotes about Surveillance.

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Surveillance Quotes

“I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.”

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Book:Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall
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“[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing. Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.”

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Book:A Government Of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State
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“The world is undergoing a movement toward authoritarianism, Delaney, and this is about order. People think the world is out of control. They want someone to stop the changes. This aligns perfectly with what the Every is doing: feeding the urge to control, to reduce nuance, to categorize, and to assign numbers to anything inherently complex. To simplify. To tell us how it will be. An authoritarian promises these things, too.”

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Book:The Every
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“For months the previous year she had monitored message boards for suggestions of terrorist activity, and while she'd never entirely thrown off the suspicion that every other poster she encountered was an undercover cop, she'd grown used to eavesdropping on tin-hat conversations, from how the government was controlling the weather to the thought-experiments carried out on anyone who rang HMRC helplines. And all of these philosophers, without exception, were convinced they were under surveillance, their every online foray or mobile chat recorded and stored for future use. That this was probably true was an irrelevance, of course; they were simply caught in the same net as everyone else. Louisa had never trapped a terrorist; never stopped a bomb. She'd read it lot of discussions about 9/11, obviously, but contributions from structural engineers had been conspicuous by their absence. And while the helpline thing wag probably true, that was just the law of averages at work.”

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Book:Real Tigers
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“However, this court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules—a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.”

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Author:Colleen McMahon
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“There are four kinds of people in the world: Those who want to profit off others without changing anything. Those who want to profit off others and would try to improve the world in so doing. Those who want to profit off of others and are willing to destroy the world to do so and finally those who don’t care to profit off others and are the inevitable victims of the other three. The trick is to know which one of these people you are.”

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Author:Volker G. Fremuth
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“Are you under surveillance?" "I was told I'd be closely watched, but I have yet to catch anyone at it." "You're not very observant. We have a car following us now." "This J2X Allard looks like a fast car. Why don't you simply speed away from them." "Speed away from them? The car following us...that's a Cadillac STS behind us. with a 300+ horsepower engine that will hurl it upwards of 260 kilometers an hour. This old Allard also has a Cadillac engine, with dual four-throat carburetors and an Iskenderian three-quarter cam." "Which means nothing to me." "I'm making a point. This was a very fast car nearly fifty years ago. It's still fast, but it won't go over 210 kilometers an hour, and that's with a tailwind. The bottom line is that he's got us outclassed in horsepower and top speed." "You must be able to do something to lose them." "There is, but I'm not sure you're going to like it.”

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Book:Shock Wave
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“The death of privacy means the death of human freedom. Imagine a world of complete neural connection: shared thoughts and feelings. People begin to organize and gain access to impressive knowledge. Equality and Unity rule the day. Division and strife seem as though they will end. But soon, as with all non-private systems, things go wrong. Coercive minds dominate others. Minority thinking is literally wiped out. Variety and quirkiness smooth to dull conformity. Harassment, thought impossible, begins to flourish; innovation and imagination, needing isolation to develop, slow to a crawl. Unique thoughts dissipate as minds sync-up to the buzz of sameness.”

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Book:The Watchman Guide to Privacy: Reclaim Your Digital, Financial, and Lifestyle Freedom
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“You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.”

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Book:Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall
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“Back then, she had to worry about the government tapping her phone. It still probably does, but all the other stuff's been outsourced. Now, instead of just a COINTELPRO operation, she’s got to worry about that and some dude stalking her relatives from his mother’s basement, and kids bombarding her with death threats because it makes them feel like part of the (terrorist) gang, and a troll farm in Russia using the Center as the next cause célèbre to whip up Nazis. All the people who really are a threat to the country; somehow they’ve been convinced to do its dirty work, more or less for free. She would admire it if it weren’t so damn horrific.”

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Book:The City We Became
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