Surveillance Quotes

“These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.”
― Edward Snowden

“The mistake we make is in thinking rape isn’t premeditated, that it happens by accident somehow, that you’re drunk and you run into a girl who’s also drunk and half-asleep on a bench and you sidle up to her and things get out of hand and before you know it, you’re being accused of something you’d never do. But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn’t a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security. Rapists exist on a spectrum, and maybe this attentive version is the most dangerous type: women are so used to being watched that we don’t notice when someone’s watching us for the worst reason imaginable. They have a plan long before we even get to the bar to order our first drink.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“There is not occupation of territory on the one hand and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.”
― Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism

“A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term "we" or "us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that "we" are all agreed on "our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ("our sensibilities are enraged...") Always ask who this "we" is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron "Maulana" Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called "US." Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was "Wherever US is, We are." It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Sunsets require sunshine ["Surveillance: Out of the Shadows," New York Review of Books, June 2, 2015].”
― David Cole

“Dean Rolfe squirmed, coughed, and looked everywhere except in Frank’s eyes. To do what was fraught with legal ramifications. These were the words he had carefully avoided, the hidden croutons in his carefully prepared word salad. “To give you the reach to keep tabs on certain people, no matter where they go. You know . . . a surveillance system.”
― Michael Benzehabe

“Those who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.”
― Freidrich Hayek

“In truth, we were similar. Like two sides of a fan, we were at odds with each other, we competed with each other, but our fates similarly rested in the hands of the Emperor--the holder, the commander, the manipulator of our destinies.”
― Weina Dai Randel, The Moon in the Palace

“I'm sure I've had my phone tapped for years, I don't think it's a crime against humanity they just ought to quit doing it, god damn it.”
― Cornel West

“Your ideas are bound to forces of which you have no control due to the fact that you've voluntarily submitted your freedom of though to the perception steering censorship of Google, Facebook and other dragnet surveillance capitalists.”
― James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

“Nobody in the government is talking. They say it’s a case of national security.”
― Kenneth Eade, The Spy Files

“Destruction of privacy via surveillance programs engineered by Great Powers widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling elite and everyone else. Its impact on global south will be colossal.”
― Arzak Khan

“If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.”
― Bruce Schneier

“That NASA was involved suggests that L.A. was considered so alien both to police officers and to scientists that it resembled the landscape of another world. There is Mars, there is the moon, and there is Los Angeles.”
― Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City

“Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. “All this. The fucking shark that eats the world.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“You'll have the right to be angry about Vault 7 only after you boycott dragnet surveillance data providers like Google, Microsoft, Skype, Facebook and LinkedIn. The true threat is coming from the private sector surveillance profiteers.”
― James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

“Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law.”
― A.E. Samaan

“There is no denying that Snowden's dramatic disclosures, despite the damage they did to U.S. intelligence, accomplished a salutary service in alerting both the public and the government to the potential danger of a surveillance leviathan." (p.299)”
― Edward Jay Epstein, How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft

“There has never been a time in human history where so many people routinely carry recording and surveillance devices.”
― Steven Magee

“Dragnet surveillance capitalists such as Facebook, Comcast, AT&T and Google, unfortunately, supply these manipulating forces with an endless supply of metadata for this information war against the American and European public.”
― James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

“A friend once told me a story about a former Black Panther leader in a Midwest community who in the 1960s had his phone tapped, while federal agents followed him everywhere. Forced to go underground, he later entered the drug trade & eventually got good at it. However, he told my friend, soon after this nobody kept tabs on him--he wasn't followed or harassed. He later became the number one drug dealer in the area. As he said this, my friend noted a breaking in his voice; the pain, perhaps, of being pushed away from being a committed community activist.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times

“Nothing goes unobserved in that strict town where people lack occupation. Malicious curiosity there has even invented what is known as a busybody, that is a double mirror fixed to the outside of the windowledge so that the streets can be monitored even from inside the houses, all the comings and goings watched, a kind of trap to catch all the exits and entrances the encounters and gestures that do not realize they are being observed, the looks that prove everything.”
― Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

“There is no transparency, Marus. It can’t exist. Surveillance doesn’t go both ways. There are those who watch, and those who are watched; the powerful, and the powerless.”
― Celeste Chaney

“I'm always under surveillance from both the NSA, the Russian KGB, and the Bulgarian Army, so I'm the most invisible.”
― Stefan D

“you want your civil liberties when you’ve told the missus you’re at the office and you’re at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone’s trying to force your bathroom window open. Can’t have it both ways.”
― Robert Galbraith

“It seems whenever the government doesn’t want anyone to know something, it is all of a sudden critical to national security.”
― Kenneth Eade, The Spy Files

“That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Since the 1970s, there has been a continual tendency to over-estimate the surveillance capacities of new technologies. In the sense of the physical invasion of privacy, surveillance comprises five sequential events: the capacity to observe; the act of observation; comprehension of what is seen; intervention on the basis of that knowledge; and a consequent change of behaviour by the subject. Too often the final four have been assumed from the possibility of the first.”
― David Vincent, Privacy: A Short History

“Surveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“The gaping wound in America’s national security is without a doubt, the unregulated dragnet surveillance capitalists.”
― James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology