128 Quotes About Surveillance
- Author Dave Eggers
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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.
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- Author Heather Marsh
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There are only two possible explanations for a sovereign nation to bankrupt its own citizens and its government in order to set up a huge international surveillance and military system, “the finest fighting force the world has ever seen” that they do not actually own or control. One, everyone is completely insane, or two, it has not been a sovereign nation for a long time. Now is the time to remember the definition of a terrorist.
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- Author David Cole
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Sunsets require sunshine ["Surveillance: Out of the Shadows," New York Review of Books, June 2, 2015].
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- Author Michel Foucault
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[D]iscipline tries to rile a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and if need be, punished.
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- Author Anna Funder
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I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped 'Approved': the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: 'Five new and different ways to break a heart'?
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- Author Davis Bunn
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His eyes touched lightly, and passed on.
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- Author Alice Walker
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And when they spy on us let them discover us loving
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- Author Edward Snowden
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If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search engine—and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example—then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.
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- Author Georges Rodenbach
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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.
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