Nsa Quotes

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it. ~ Edward Snowden

When the United States cannibalize dollars from the defensive business of the NSA, securing our communications, protecting our systems, patching zero-day vulnerabilities, and instead we're giving those dollars to be used for creating new vulnerabilities in our systems so that they can surveil us and other people abroad who use the same systems. ~ Edward Snowden

The president began this program by executive order. He should immediately end it by executive order. For over a year now, he has said the program is illegal, and yet he does nothing. ~ Rand Paul

Some in Washington say that you have to trade your liberty for security. ~ Rand Paul

If anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Someone from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail. ~ Stephen Colbert

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things. ~ Edward Snowden

I believe that when senator Ron Wyden and senator Mark Udall asked about the scale of this, they the NSA said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians. ~ Edward Snowden

I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution's protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The ~ Tim Weiner

Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised – or by what means – knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they'll be able to say is: "We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don't know about or can't talk about. ~ Bruce Schneier

I'm a strong believer in strong encryption. ~ Barack Obama

When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about ... What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers, and durations of calls; they are not looking at people's names and they're not looking at content ... If the intelligence committee actually wants to listen to a phone call they have to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation. ~ Barack Obama

The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security. Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security, just so they have a better chance of keeping an eye on us. ~ Edward Snowden

it is quite disturbing to know that anyone can look at what we are doing online at any given moment. There are millions and millions of other people using the internet who choose not to take special precautions. Without taking the extra step to protect your online activities, anyone from the NSA, FBI, and general hackers can see what you search while on the internet. One ~ Evan Lane

Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. ~ Barack Obama

The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny. ~ Edward Snowden

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics. ~ Edward Snowden

The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together. ~ Edward Snowden

I was right outside the NSA [on 9/11], so I remember the tension on that day. I remember hearing on the radio, 'the plane's hitting,' and I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time, was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it ... I take the threat of terrorism seriously, and I think we all do. And I think it's really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort-of scandalize our memories to sort-of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through
and to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don't need to give up, and that our Constitution says we should not give up. ~ Edward Snowden

It's so much easier to debate people when you can pretend that they hold moronic position that they don't actually believe. ~ Glenn Greenwald

I was thinking about how people were upset about the information that came out from Snowden about the NSA - many people were upset, including myself. But I was kind of surprised by how little we did about it - how little fighting we did. ~ Maggie Gyllenhaal

You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place. ~ Edward Snowden

The NSA is the only branch of the government that actually listens to people. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

Such technological tools ... are helping us now in the hot war against terrorists who would bomb this theater if they had the capacity to do so. ~ Alan Dershowitz

He didn't have regular email like everyone else. He couldn't afford that digital fingerprint that the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and all the other espionage alphabeticals counted on for their privacy-bashing surveillance of the entire formerly free world. ~ Kenneth Eade

If you use your smart toothbrush, the data can be immediately sent to your dentist and your insurance company, but it also allows someone from the NSA to know what was in your mouth three weeks ago. ~ Evgeny Morozov

For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, " 'does engage' in computer network exploitation," but "does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including 'cyber' " [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its "customers," a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce: ~ Glenn Greenwald

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

At the Pentagon, for instance, in the NMCC's secure Emergency Actions room, military officials could find anyone in the Constitution's line of succession by checking the screen of a dedicated Zenith Z-150 Central Locator System computer. The CLS computers are protected by a special NSA protocol known as TEMPEST that shields them from electromagnetic snooping. II ~ Garrett M. Graff

We need the security standards to apply to the internet. We need to be able to trust that when we send our emails through Verizon, that Verizon isn't sharing with the NSA, that Verizon isn't sharing them with the FBI or German intelligence or French intelligence or Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence. ~ Edward Snowden

Those who are troubled by our existing programs are not interested in a repeat of 9/11, and those who defend these programs are not dismissive of civil liberties. The challenge is getting the details right, and that's not simple. ~ Barack Obama

Please give reason. Raised taxes; marching us off to war again; approved more NSA snooping. WHO ARE THEY?! ~ Matt Drudge

If Pakistan NSA wants to come he is welcome. But talks will only be on terrorism. No scope for expansion of agenda. ~ Sushma Swaraj

I'm glad that the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country. I'm glad that activity is going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to ... Yes, I am sure that that's what they're doing. ~ Lindsey Graham

NSA has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet. ~ Glenn Greenwald

With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States. ~ Barack Obama

Was the leaker in question, Ed Snowden, was he a traitor? ~ Michele Bachmann

The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor. ~ Jay Carney

Expose the Jesuit order and learn about the global genocide. Speak out, even when what you have to say is not popular. ~ John Reynaga

There are a lot of things that I really question - the legality of the drone strikes, these NSA revelations. Jimmy Carter came out and said we don't live in a democracy. That's a little intense when an ex-president says that. So you know, he's got some explaining to do, particularly for a constitutional law professor. ~ Matt Damon

We need trust among allies and partners. Such trust now has to be built anew. ~ Angela Merkel

We need to make sure that leaks of classified information, of national security secrets, needs to be rigorously pursued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. ~ John O. Brennan

There is no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the president is openly violating our nation's laws by authorizing the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. ~ John Conyers

Part of what we're trying to do is lay out what really happened. For example, I've been trying to get across that the intelligence leadership did not just keep the country in the dark. They actively misled the country on key issues. When you have someone who heads the NSA saying we don't hold data at all on US citizens, that's one of the most misleading statements I believe that's ever been made about surveillance policy. And I think that now we're starting to get that message across. ~ Ron Wyden

Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind's only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic. ~ William Giraldi

I can do more good outside of prison ... This country is worth dying for. ~ Edward Snowden

One of the most surreal aspects of the NSA stories based on the Snowden documents is how they made even the most paranoid conspiracy theorists seem like paragons of reason and common sense. ~ Bruce Schneier

Any time you make an analogy to horrific people in history, Mussolini or Hitler, people say, 'Oh, you're exaggerating, you're talking about, it's hyperbole.' Maybe it is ... But I would say is that if you are not concerned that democracy could produce bad people, I don't think you're really thinking this through too much. ~ Rand Paul

There are scores of people who have never recovered, or been recovered, from an FSB interrogation.

They're a hard organization to describe because nothing like the FSB exists in the USA. To get even remotely close, you'd have to ask the CIA to birth a seven-headed hydra with the faces of the FBI, DEA, NSA, Immigration, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, and the Navy Seals with a hangover and a grudge. ~ Tanya Thompson

Most people remember COINTELPRO from the days of the Black Panthers, Yippies, and other revolutionary groups who threatened our government during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. Sensing that these groups might incite American citizens into radical action, the FBI sent in agents to agitate members of these various groups, often pitting them against each other through various forms of subterfuge, such as blackmail.

It appears that the CIA, FBI, and NSA are now sending their goons into the metaphysical marketplace, making sure that people who think they are aspiring to higher and positively transformative things are, in reality, only becoming more self-indulgent, disconnected, and confused.

The biggest influx of these agents occurred during the blossoming of the "human potential" movement in the early '70s, through such institutions as Esalen. Legions of people threw away their protest banners and followed their bliss during a time when directly addressing the socio-political problems of the day was imperative.

Since then, the emphasis on personal development - and more recently, the You Create Your Own Reality movement - a significant segment of the population has been brainwashed into disdaining all socio-political issues. For what better way to disempower people than to have them focus on their personal evolution at the expense of their families, communities, and the countries they live in? ~ David Icke

The hacking practice is quite widespread in its own right: one NSA document indicates that the agency has succeeded in infecting at least fifty thousand individual computers with a type of malware called "Quantum Insertion." One map shows the places where such operations have been performed and the number of successful insertions: ~ Glenn Greenwald

I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts. Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many. ~ Edward Snowden

A lot of the things that we've been able to do in the last several years were Democratic ideas, including the structure for this new director of national intelligence. ~ Jane Harman

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency. ~ Edward Snowden

Everybody should have their own personal logo. Mine is a smiley face that's winking, as if I'm passing on secret knowledge. But it's not like I tell just anybody. My secrets are so sought after that the NSA is always whispering at me to try to get me to give them something, anything. ~ Jarod Kintz

What we revealed is that this spying system is devoted not to terrorists, but is directed to innocent people around the world. None of this has anything to do with terrorism. Is Angela Merkel a terrorist? ~ Glenn Greenwald

The medium is the message, the message is encrypted, and the encryption key is controlled by NSA. ~ The Covert Comic

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

I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people. ~ Al Franken

Sales of George Orwell's 1984 have skyrocketed. It's true. So the fallout from the (NSA spying) scandal is worse than we thought. It's forcing Americans to read. ~ Conan O'Brien

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material, and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. ~ Daniel Ellsberg

We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties. ~ Barack Obama

Let me ask, who died and made him king? Who gave him the authority to endanger 300 million Americans? That's not the way it works, and if he thinks he can get away with that, he's got another think coming. ~ John Bolton

The president should stop apologizing, stop being defensive. The reality is the NSA has saved thousands of lives not just in the United States but in France, Germany and throughout Europe. ~ Peter King

It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community. ~ Dianne Feinstein

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA's compliance record. ~ Barton Gellman

For a thirty-day period ending in February 2013, one unit of the NSA collected more than three billion pieces of communication data from US communication systems ~ Glenn Greenwald

The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11 ... The program does not involve the NSA examining the phone records of ordinary Americans. Rather, it consolidates these records into a database that the government can query if it has a specific lead - phone records that the companies already retain for business purposes. ~ Barack Obama

Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? ~ Edward Snowden

Why did we not know that heads of state were being eavesdropped on, spied on? We are the intelligence committee and we didn't know that. ~ Jan Schakowsky

The NSA should keep close watch on suspected terrorists to keep our country safe - through programs permitting due process, the naming of a suspect, and oversight by an accountable court. ~ Rand Paul

Like a black hole, NSA pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to escape. ~ James Bamford

The IRS targeting certain groups for harassment because of their politics would be unfair. If we found out the NSA was keeping special tabs on everyone who worshiped at a mosque or took a Bible trip through the Middle East, you'd have an uprising. ~ Gail Collins

Nobody ever was fired for 9/11. Instead of firing the people who didn't do a good job, we gave them medals. The guy who did a good job, I don't know what happened to him. And what we did was we decided we'd just collect everybody's information. That we'd sort of scrap the Bill of Rights. ~ Rand Paul

The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world. ~ Simon Singh

We must remain mindful of the potential impact of over-correcting the authorizations of the intelligence community. ~ James R. Clapper

One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy. ~ Barack Obama

Effective immediately, we will only pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of three. ~ Barack Obama

There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA. ~ Barton Gellman

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. ~ Edward Snowden

If you were watching CNN, they were saying the NSA is listening to your phone calls. It's reading your emails. When you call your grandma in Arkansas, the NSA knows. All total bulls - t. They made the public more concerned about the privacy issue than the legitimate facts should have done. ~ Michael Morell

Personally, the NSA collecting data on me freaks me out. It totally freaks me out. And yet I'm from the generation that wants to put a GPS in their kids so I always know where they are. ~ Joss Whedon

Thanks to Edward Snowden and others, the great threat from the NSA surveillance is now more clearly understood. Current attacks on our liberties very greatly infringe the freedoms meant to be protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. If a whistle-blower reveals the truth about wrongful government actions, calls arise to charge him with treason for hating America. Allies become enemies when it becomes known that we spy on them as well, as it has now been revealed. ~ Ron Paul

But eavesdropping acquired a new, and more intense, life after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. "Never again" was an impossible mandate, of course, but the only way to have any hope of preventing something from happening is to know everything that is happening. That led the NSA to put the entire planet under surveillance. ~ Bruce Schneier

As the Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, I have been briefed since 2003 on a highly classified NSA foreign collection program that targeted Al Qaeda. I believe the program is essential to US national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities. ~ Jane Harman

Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. ~ Edward Snowden

Lots of data gets collected through the latest technology today, and not all of it is about people's consumer preferences. ~ Lisa Randall

I worry very much about kids growing up in a society where they think: "I'm not going to talk about this issue, read this book or explore this idea because someone may think I'm a terrorist." That's not the kind of free society I want for our children. ~ Bernie Sanders

We are now shocked at the current spate of alphabetic scandals - IRS, AP, NSA, VA. But why are we surprised, given that Obama never told the truth about his relationships with the old terrorist Bill Ayers and former PLO ad hoc spokesman Rashid Khalidi, or about the creepy land deal with the crook Tony Rezko? If the Obama White House demonized the Tea Party as tea-baggers, or compared the Republican House opposition to terrorists and arsonists, why should we be astonished, given how he was elected to the U.S. Senate? Quite mysteriously, his primary opponent, Blair Hull, and his general-election opponent, Jack Ryan, both of whom were favored to win, had their confidential divorce records leaked. Their campaigns subsequently imploded. ~ Anonymous

After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power - the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government - for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. ~ Edward Snowden

So I think it's important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed about exactly what we're doing. ~ Barack Obama

I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is. ~ Edward Snowden

The community of technical experts who really manage the internet, who built the internet and maintain it, are becoming increasingly concerned about the activities of agencies like the NSA or Cyber Command, because what we see is that defense is becoming less of a priority than offense. ~ Edward Snowden

One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance. ~ Edward Snowden

Our intelligence agencies will continue to gather information about the intentions of governments - as opposed to ordinary citizens - around the world, in the same way that the intelligence services of every other nation does. We will not apologize simply because our services may be more effective. ~ Barack Obama

There is no more direct or honest person than Jim Clapper. ~ Dianne Feinstein

Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President ~ Edward Snowden

What we need to do, is restore those tools that have been taken away by the president [Barack Obama] and others, restore those tools to the NSA and to our entire surveillance and law enforcement community. ~ Chris Christie

The NSA?"

"Yeah, they called and offered to help out. Same software they use for enhancing spy satellite imagery."

Venkat shrugged. "It's amazing how much red tape gets cut when everyone's rooting for one man to survive. ~ Andy Weir

Really? I love this place. We draw more power in this room than the average small town in Maryland. The spinning servers down there actually generate enough friction to reduce our heating bill by forty percent in the winter." He spread his arms and smiled. "See? Even the NSA is going green! ~ Andrew Warren