Glenn Greenwald:

For anyone who supports the general Obama "war on terror" approach or specifically his claimed power to target even US citizens for execution without charges, it's impossible to object to Graham's arguments on principled or theoretical grounds. Once you endorse the "whole-globe-is-a-battlefield" theory, then there's no principled way to exclude US soil.

Bruce Schneier:

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters.

Mark Andreesen:

A lot of people looked at Facebook and saw a Web site. None of the people close to Mark [Zuckerberg] and the company thought of Facebook as a Web site. They think of it as a data set, a feedback loop.

David Montgomery, Sari Horwitz and Marc Fisher:

How federal and local investigators sifted through that ocean of evidence ... is an object lesson in how hard it is to separate the meaningful from the noise in a world awash with information.

Rolf Dobelli:

Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

Adam C. Engst:

Our only weapon in the war against the infinite is self-control. Regardless of the specifics, if you overindulge in information, no matter how good your tools, you will eventually be crushed by the infinite.

Stefany Anne Golberg:

Never mind not seeing the forest for the trees. In this ... you cannot even see the trees for the bark.

WSJ:

Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people's computers and cellphones, and "massive intercept" gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country.

The documents -- the highlights of which are cataloged and searchable here -- were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month.

Benjamin Wittes:

We seldom stop and ask the question of whether and when our surveillance programs are really coming at the expense of liberty at all or whether the relationship might be more complicated than that -- indeed, whether some of these programs might even enhance liberty.

We should ask these questions because the balance metaphor is incomplete to the point of inducing a deep cognitive error. Any crude notion of a "balancing" between security and liberty badly misstates the relationship between these two goods -- that in the vast majority of circumstances, liberty and security are better understood as necessary preconditions for one another than in some sort of standoff. The absence of liberty will tend to guarantee an absence of security, and conversely, one cannot talk meaningfully about an individual's having liberty in the absence of certain basic conditions of security. While either in excess can threaten the other, neither can meaningfully exist without the other.

Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

The end of the rainbow would be the ability to store all traffic, then decide later which messages were worthy of further study.

Philip Hensher:

I wish there was some less feeble response to this constant, exhausting, draining surveillance we live under.

Tim Pool:

I spoke with Geoff Shively, and he said, we have got plans for a hack that's going to make this essentially the most badass drone -- "The SkyWitness," is what he calls it.

Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

The end of the rainbow would be the ability to store all traffic, then decide later which messages were worthy of further study.

Decius:

We are exactly what they accuse us of being, and the proof is the way that we've reacted to them.

It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.

Congressman Ted Poe, Republican from Texas, on the Send Equipment for National Defense (SEND) Act:

This legislation mandates that the Secretary of Defense transfer 10% of eligible returning equipment from Iraq to state and local law enforcement agencies for border security purposes. Eligible equipment would include: humvees, night vision equipment and surveillance unmanned aerial vehicles.

Philip Hensher:

I wish there was some less feeble response to this constant, exhausting, draining surveillance we live under.

Geoff Manaugh:

It seems only a matter of time before armed police drones are a reality in the United States.

We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this very kind of spy equipment already exists and has already been deployed. That is, the unnerving implication that we are being watched from above by undetectable robots should not let us forget that being watched from above by human pilots is just as invasive.

Decius:

Man, what a great time to be alive!

Bellovin, Blaze, Diffie, Landau, Neumann, and Rexford:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Tim O'Reilly:

We need to move away from a Maginot-line like approach where we try to put up walls to keep information from leaking out, and instead assume that most things that used to be private are now knowable via various forms of data mining. Once we do that, we start to engage in a question of what uses are permitted, and what uses are not.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Decius:

One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-9/11 mentality.

Charlie Savage:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The manual clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs.

Decius:

My blog post is not important, but it is important that people have a right to blog without worrying about receiving legal threats when they haven't done anything wrong.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

Tim Wu:

The government has conferred its blessing on monopolies in information industries with unusual frequency. Sometimes this protection has yielded reciprocal benefits, with the owner of an information network offering the state something valuable in return, like warrantless wiretaps.

Decius:

We need to balance privacy interests with the state's interest in monitoring suspected criminals.

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Charlie Savage:

Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.

Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies.

Under the proposal, firms would have to design systems to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped.

US-China Economic and Security Review Commission:

Nearly 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic -- including data from the Pentagon, the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other US government websites -- was briefly redirected through computer networks in China last April.

Computer security researchers have noted that the capability could enable severe malicious activities.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Eric Schmidt:

You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

FBI Seeks Wider Wiretap Law for Web

G.W. Schulz:

Government employees nevertheless have more opportunities today than ever before to dig deep into the lives of everyone else. And they do.

Joe Reiss, VP of marketing at AS&E:

We do what our customers need.

Christopher Caldwell:

The line between Google and government is destined to blur.

Eric Schmidt:

You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.

Conrad Quilty-Harper:

Tesco can predict when people will shop, how they'll pay for their items and even how many calories they will consume.

Cristopher Drew:

As economic crimes become easier to commit -- in some cases as simple as downloading data and pressing "Send" -- security analysts say some American companies must share the blame for thefts because they do not adequately monitor employees.

Julian Sanchez:

They're calling it a tweak.

Yet those four little words would make a huge difference.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Sanchez:

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued, such broad authority would not only raise enormous privacy concerns but have profound implications for First Amendment speech and association interests.

Decius:

Man, what a great time to be alive!

Obama's Power Grab

Noah Shachtman:

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come.

CEO Christopher Ahlberg:

We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring

Ellen Nakashima:

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters.

Stewart Baker:

It'll be faster and easier to get the data.

Nakashima:

Senior administration officials said the proposal was prompted by a desire to overcome concerns and resistance from Internet and other companies that the existing statute did not allow them to provide such data without a court-approved order.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity

Julia Angwin and Tom McGinty:

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive.

Some of the tracking files were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only.

An exchange:

Charlie Rose: Don't you think we've milked this for about as much as we can, Richard?

Richard Florida: I hope not, Charlie. I hope not.

Mike Zaneis, of the Interactive Advertising Bureau:

We are delivering free content to consumers. Sometimes it means that we get involved in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.

Josh Harris:

Everything is free, except the video that we capture of you. That we own.

Denton Gentry:

We might recoil from this, but I suspect it is not something which can be stopped. The technology has reached the point where these things are feasible, and there is a huge economic incentive to do so. A concerted effort to stop it results in the technology being less visible, not absent.

Marc Lacey:

There has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest US Websites