Whatever your political leanings, it is disturbing that federal authorities were spying on emails and other private communications between President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani during Trump's first impeachment.

Easy spying is supposed to nab bad guys, but what happens when the small cabal of desperate men who head the security state see the future president as the bad guy?

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of American history knows that unchecked spying undermines democracy and public trust.

I'm sure, in real life, spying is boring - there's probably a lot of sitting around and plenty of paperwork. But the world seems to think that spying is exciting, and that's how movies get made.

Spying has always gone on since ancient times.

I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.

I think space exploration is very important. I think there is very intelligent life on Mars. I believe that Martians are spying on us from the bottom of the ocean.

But the government spying on me was not done under the authority of a court warrant. That's why my case is even more dangerous than the others.

The 'FISA Amendments Act' would gut the oversight system established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which subjected domestic spying to review by a special intelligence court.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.

I used to try to pick locks because I grew up on my grandparents' farm and I started my own little spy club. I would go around the farm and try to break into the shed and try spying on my grandpa. It was ridiculous.

I think a lot of people like hidden-camera shows where they think they're spying on somebody who doesn't know they're looking at them. And nobody takes it seriously - you either enjoy it and get a laugh out of the reactions or not.

Spying among friends is never acceptable.

Barr has thrown himself in with Trump in ways unbecoming to the nation's highest legal official. His conduct in trying to clear Trump is of a piece with his baseless attacks on 'spying' by the FBI and his defiance of Congress's subpoenas.

We're not interested in applications where you're spying on people.

The Supreme Court must strike down the government's illegal spying program as a violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.

The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.

The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.