Surveillance Quotes - Page 3

• Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

  Garrison Keillor

  Children, Ignorance, Kids

  Garrison Keillor (1990). “Leaving Home”, p.22, Penguin

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• The internet is like a surround system, a landscape at its most benign, a closed system of surveillance and self-surveillance at its more sinister. Something we can no longer imagine an outside of.

  Tom Burr

  Self, Landscape, Internet

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The passed Pawn is a criminal, who should be kept under lock and key. Mild measures, such as police surveillance, are not sufficient

  Aron Nimzowitsch

  Keys, Police, Criminals

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• The merging of the military-industrial complex, surveillance state and unbridled corporate power points to the need for strategies that address what is specific about the current warfare and surveillance state and the neoliberal project and how different interests, modes of power, social relations, public pedagogies and economic configurations come together to shape its politics.

  Henry Giroux

  Military, Surveillance State, Together

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Republicans don't want to shrink government. They want more and more military, more and more surveillance. They'd like to have the government banning gay marriage and so forth.

  John Zerzan

  Military, Gay, Government

  "'We don't know what's going to happen. If we say we're doomed, we are, full stop.' A Q&A with John Zerzan and Zander Sherman". logger.believermag.com. December 4, 2015.

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• Police in Washington D.C. are now using cameras to catch drivers who go through red lights. Many congressmen this week opposed the use of the red light cameras incorrectly assuming they were being used for surveillance at local brothels.

  Dennis Miller

  Funny, Humor, Light

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• While Congress saw some need to loosen the standard in the initial days of a war, it wanted the president to comply with FISA in carrying out surveillance in the United States.

  Jonathan Turley

  War, President, United States

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• Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.

  Barack Obama

  Nsa, Listening, Telephones

  "'Nobody is listening to your calls': Obama's evolution on NSA surveillance" by Adam Gabbatt, www.theguardian.com. August 9, 2013.

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• The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  World Government, Historical, Would Be

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• 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.

  Louis Stokes

  Kings, Drs, Weight

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• The Sage of Toronto... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity.

  Guy Debord

  Gossip, Boredom, Sage

  "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle". Book by Guy Debord, 1988.

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• If we had failed to pursue the facts as far as they led, we would have denied the public any knowledge of an unprecedented scheme of political surveillance and sabotage.

  Katharine Graham

  Political, Facts, Economy

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• These anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that solidifies the power of the rich and the structures of the military-industrial-surveillance-academic complex by presenting the ideologies, institutions and relations of the powerful as commonsense.

  Henry Giroux

  Powerful, Military, Machines

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Work, Organization, Groups

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• Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.

  Edward Snowden

  Sacrifice, Surveillance State, Talking

  "Ex-CIA Worker Edward Snowden Says He Leaked Surveillance Data" by Anugrah Kumar, www.christianpost.com. June 10, 2013.

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• Snowden has presented us with choices on how we want to move forward into the future. We're at a crossroads and we still don't quite know which path we're going to take. Without Snowden, just about everyone would still be in the dark about the amount of information the government is collecting. I think that Snowden has changed consciousness about the dangers of surveillance.

  Laura Poitras

  Moving, Dark, Thinking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Thinking, Rights, People

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

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• The atmosphere of fear and security manipulated by the government has converted American citizens into terrorist suspects who are all subject to arbitrary and unreviewable detention and surveillance.

  Richard A. Falk

  Government, Atmosphere, Citizens

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.

  Edward Snowden

  Rights, Phones, Nsa

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• From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance.

  Charles Tilly

  Men, People, Political

  Charles Tilly, Gabriel Ardant, Social Science Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Comparative Politics (1975). “The Formation of national States in Western Europe”, Princeton Univ Pr

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• You have an always-expanding, omnipresent surveillance state that's constantly chipping away at the liberties and freedoms of law-abiding Americans.

  Ron Wyden

  Surveillance State, Law, Liberty

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• The surveillance revelations are critically important because they revealed that our rights are being redefined in secret, by secret courts that were never intended to have that role - without the consent of the public, without even the awareness of the majority of our political representatives.

  Edward Snowden

  Rights, Political, Secret

  Source: www.thenation.com

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• Many of our ally states don't have these constitutional protections - in the UK, in New Zealand, in Australia. They've lost the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. All of those countries, in the wake of these surveillance revelations, rushed through laws that were basically ghostwritten by the National Security Agency to enable mass surveillance without court oversight, without all of the standard checks and balances that one would expect.

  Edward Snowden

  Country, Agency, Law

  Source: www.thenation.com

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• Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere.

  Bob Barr

  Home, Government, Ironic

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• It is perfectly clear that people, given no alternative, will choose tyranny over anarchy, because anarchy is the worst tyranny of all... The special nature of liberties is that they can be defended only as long as we still have them. So the very first signs of their erosion must be resisted, whether the issue be domestic surveillance by the Army, so-called preventive detention, or the freedom of corporate television, or that of a campus newspaper.

  Eric Sevareid

  Army, Erosion, Issues

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