Marc Andreessen:

In the 1940s something really significant happened, which is we bombed the rest of the industrialized world. The one major industrial country that wasn't bombed was the United States. So the United States became the monopoly producer of industrial goods. It was an accident of history. We had a window of opportunity which we took full advantage of.

Robert Hannigan, director of GCHQ:

However much they may dislike it, the largest US technology companies which dominate the web have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us. If they are to meet this challenge, it means coming up with better arrangements for facilitating lawful investigation by security and law enforcement agencies than we have now.

G.W. Schulz and Amanda Pike:

The Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED teamed up to take an inside look at the emerging technologies that could revolutionize policing -- and how intrusively the public is monitored by the government. The technology is forcing the public and law enforcement to answer a central question: When have police crossed the line from safer streets to expansive surveillance that threatens to undermine the nation's constitutional values?

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel:

The general legal consensus is that police will be able to subpoena car logs the same way they now subpoena phone records.

Evgeny Morozov:

In shifting the focus of regulation from reining in institutional and corporate malfeasance to perpetual electronic guidance of individuals, algorithmic regulation offers us a good-old technocratic utopia of politics without politics. Disagreement and conflict, under this model, are seen as unfortunate byproducts of the analog era -- to be solved through data collection -- and not as inevitable results of economic or ideological conflicts.

Doris Lessing:

What government, anywhere in the world, will happily envisage its subjects learning to free themselves from governmental and state rhetoric and pressures? Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on.

Economist:

America's preeminence is over.