21 quotes
The history of human knowledge is nothing more than the realization that yesterday's pieties are actually shameful errors.
History leaves no doubt that collective coercion and control is both the intent and effect of state surveillance.
No Place to Hide (2014)
Who has brought more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six decades than the U.S.
Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only antidote.
No Place to Hide (2014)
The national religion in the United States is worship of all things military. And journalists are its high priests.
To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.
No Place to Hide (2014)
Those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully.
Over the pasty decades, the fear of terrorism—stoked by consistent exaggerations of the actual threat—has been exploited by US leaders to justify a weird array of extremist policies.
No Place to Hide (2014)
Nobody needed the US Constitution to guarantee press freedom so that journalists could befriend, amplify and glorify political leaders; the guarantee was necessary so that journalists could do the opposite.
No Place to Hide (2014)
Nothing is more vital than enabling true transparency and adversarial journalism, and preventing further assaults on them.
New press freedom group is launched to block US government attacks (2012)
But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers [by Huawei], foreign organizations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones.
No Place to Hide (2014)
No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. [...] A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.
No Place to Hide (2014)
There's a huge dichotomy between people who grow up with alienation, which, for me, was invaluable, and people who grow up so completely privileged that it breeds this complacency and lack of desire to question or challenge or do anything significant.
Number of people in the US under the age of 18: 74.2 million. Number of people in the US under the age of 18 who have died of COVID since the pandemic began: 361.
Imposing or propping up dictators subservient to the U.S. has long been, and continues to be, the preferred means for U.S. policymakers to ensure that those inconvenient popular beliefs are suppressed.
Trump’s Support and Praise of Despots Is Central to the U.S. Tradition, Not a Deviation From It (2017)
It's so ironic they [the Democratic Party] spent four years claiming they are fighting fascism and authoritarianism, and what are they trying to do now? They're trying to harness corporate and monopoly power to silence everyone who disagrees with them, the very hallmark, the epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting, but which in reality they embody.
Don't even try that pathetic tactic. Huge numbers of people are disgusted by what you're doing. She's a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors & half-Mexican. And maybe as a gay Jew, I also have a personal stake in who is and isn't an actual Nazi. You don't own this discourse.
Companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and AT&T employ hordes of former top government officials, while hordes of current top defense officials are past (and likely future) employees of those same corporations. Constantly growing the surveillance state is a way to ensure that the government funds keep flowing, that the revolving door stays greased.
No Place to Hide (2014)
Thus, for all the government's denials, the NSA has no substantial constraints on whom it can spy and how. [...] The NSA is the definitive rogue agency: empowered to do whatever it wants with very little control, transparency, or accountability.
No Place to Hide (2014)
More remarkable is the fact that in country after country, revelations that the NSA was spying on hundreds of millions of their citizens produced little more than muted objections from their political leadership. True indignation came gushing forward only once those leaders understood that they, and not just their citizens, had been targeted as well.
No Place to Hide (2014)