Barack Obama
Politician
"I'm a strong believer in strong encryption."
Nsa quotes
Nsa
187 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Rand Paul
Politician
"Any time someone tries to tell you that metadata is 'meaningless, don't worry, it's just who you call, it's just phone records, it's not a big deal' - realize we kill people based on metadata. So they must be pretty darn certain that they think they know something based on metadata."
Barack Obama
Politician
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls."
Aesop
Fabulist
"Good things come in small packages."
Rand Paul
Politician
"In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was rushed to the floor. Several hundred pages. Nobody read it ... But people voted because they were fearful and people said there could be another attack and Americans will blame me if I don't vote on this."
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"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."
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"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."
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"US intelligence agencies will only use such data to meet specific security requirements: counterintelligence, counterterrorism, counterproliferation, cybersecurity, force protection for our troops and allies, and combating transnational crime, including sanctions evasion."
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"Effective immediately, we will only pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of three."
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"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."
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"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."
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"A number of countries, including some who have loudly criticized the NSA, privately acknowledge that America has special responsibilities as the world's only superpower, that our intelligence capabilities are critical to meeting these responsibilities, and that they themselves have relied on the information we obtain to protect their own people."
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"There's something totally crazy about this."
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"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."
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"I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts, go unchallenged. At the very least, we should debate. We should debate whether or not we are going to relinquish our rights, or whether or not we are going to have a full and able debate over whether or not we can live within the Constitution, or whether or not we have to go around the Constitution."
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"The president overstepped his authority when he asked the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls without obtaining a warrant."
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"I hope we follow Mr. Snowden to the ends of the Earth to bring him to justice."
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"If any individual who objects to government policy can take it in their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will never be able to keep our people safe or conduct foreign policy."
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"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."
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"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."
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"You wonder why your government's completely broken? We lurch from deadline to deadline, and it's on purpose really. We do deadline to deadline because ... 'we've got to go. It's spring break, we're going to be late for spring break, and we've got to go, so we've got to finish this up before we go.'"
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"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."
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"The challenges posed by threats like terrorism, proliferation, and cyber attacks are not going away any time soon, and for our intelligence community to be effective over the long haul, we must maintain the trust of the American people and people around the world."
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"What is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial interests."
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"My relationship with Silicon Valley and the tech community historically has been really good. Many of these folks are my friends."
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