“The surveillance capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything… There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [NSA] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
– Senator Frank Church, 1975

“Surveillance machines are going to get smarter. They’re already starting to recognise people’s faces in the street, and systems that spot abnormal behavior will not be far behind… a sophisticated visual security system that predicts when a crime is about to be committed… Once connected to such intelligent systems, closed-circuit television (CCTV) will shift from being a mainly passive device for gathering evidence after a crime, to a tool for crime prevention… The system works by detecting any behaviors that deviate from the ‘normal’ range of human behavior: the computer recognises them as pattems. If anyone deviates from these patterns, the system sounds the alarm… it spots any abnormal behavior.”
– New Scientist, 1999

“By the “US. national security state” I mean to the Executive Office of the White House, the National Security Council (NSC), National Security Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, Pentagon, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other such units that are engaged in surveillance, suppression, covert action, and forceful interventions abroad and at home.”
– Michael Parenti

“FEMA became, under President Ronald Reagan, the agency responsible for preserving and refining the ‘Garden Plot’ strategies for surveillance and detention of domestic protest.”
– Peter Dale Scott

“We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.”
– US Supreme Court Justice William O.Douglas,

“War or the threat of war provides both atmosphere and the justification for a variety of government strategies – encroachment on civil liberties, manic surveillance of the population, a climate of fear and jingoism that makes mild dissent seem gross treachery – strategies designed to disarm and destroy internal opposition rather than the external enemy.”
– Paul O’Flynn

“The government claims that all surveillance and other activities ceased after the exposure of illegal domestic intervention by the FBI in the early 1970s, but this is a lie. Throughout the 1980s, Central America solidarity activists in the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador had their offices broken into and files stolen. In 1990, two environmental activists in Earth First!, Judi Ban and Darryl Cherney, were seriously injured when their car exploded from a pipe bomb believed to be planted by the FBI and police…
Every state uses domestic surveillance and repression against those who seek to challenge its policies and power. Even the most democratic governments create legal loopholes that allow them to suspend democratic rights when “national security” is threatened, i.e., when their power and the propertied interests they represent are called into question.”
– Sherry Wolf

“Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies and too much information has been collected. The government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs pose no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power …. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed – including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials … Government officials – including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law – have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.”
– Senator Frank Church, 1976

“One of the first booms for the homeland security industry was surveillance cameras, 4.2 million of which have been installed in Britain, one for every fourteen people, and 30 million in the U.S..”
– Naomi Klein

“American fascism is not just private, elite control over the legal system, nor private evasion of the rule of law. It’s a crisis-induced transition from a society with a deeply compromised legal system to a society where force and surveillance completely supplant that system.”
= Michael C. Ruppert

“To this day I do not understand why I was made the subject of the wiretapping, the bugging, or the surveillance, or whether the purpose was really to entrap me or perhaps someone inside the government who might be speaking to me. I am only sure that a monster has been allowed to grow up, and unless it is subject to regular control by impartial persons I think all of us will be the victims.”
= Washington DC columnist Joseph Kraft in his testimony to the United States Senate in 1974, about surveillance of him by the Nixon Administration

US Army Military Intelligence Groups (MIGs) … employed 798 army officers and 1,532 civilians including 67 black undercover agents. Of this total force, 1,576 were directly involved in domestic intelligence gathering, and of these “spies,” some 260 were civilians.
The MIG officers were responsible for eye-to-eye surveillance operations which included audio and visual recordings of people and events designated as targets. Dr King was a target and throughout the last year of his life was under surveillance by one or another MIG team.”
– William F. Pepper in his book An Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King

“In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on American life…
However detached from the wars being fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays far from home for long. It’s already returning in the form of new security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.”
– Alfred W. McCoy