Ronald Reagan:

We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.

Ken McLeod:

The illusion of choice is an indication of a lack of freedom.

Gregory Ferenstein:

Like it or not, transparency is coming.

Michael Sorkin, on recent construction in lower Manhattan:

The three buildings now or nearly done are clad in identically proportioned mirror glazing ... Like the NSA headquarters outside Washington, a humongous, foreboding, mirrored glyph set in a parking lot, these buildings emphasize that their business is none of ours.

Cowed by the challenge of rising to the symbolic occasion, the architects have produced buildings of neither originality nor weight. Instead, their structures seek, in fleeting reflections of sky and circumstance, to stealthily disappear. But, enormous, they cannot.

Charles Stross:

We are now entering a pre-revolutionary state, much as the nations of Europe did in 1849 with the suppression of the wave of revolutions that spurred, among other things, the writing of "The Communist Manifesto". It took more than a half-century for that pre-revolutionary situation to mature to the point of explosion, but explode it did, giving rise to the messy fallout of the 20th century. I don't know how long this pre-revolutionary situation will last -- although I would be surprised if it persisted for less than two decades -- but the whirlwind we reap will be ugly indeed: if you want to see how ugly, look to the Arab Spring and imagine it fought by finger-sized killer drones that know what you wrote on Facebook eighteen years ago when you were younger, foolish, and uncowed. And which is armed with dossiers the completeness of which the East German Stasi could only fantasize about.

Wolfgang Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi:

It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won't be used. This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people's privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.

John Naughton:

George Orwell feared that we would be destroyed by the things we fear -- the state surveillance apparatus so vividly evoked in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Aldous Huxley's nightmare, set out in Brave New World, his great dystopian novel, was that we would be undone by the things that delight us.