Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.

I am disturbed by how states abuse laws on Internet access. I am concerned that surveillance programmes are becoming too aggressive. I understand that national security and criminal activity may justify some exceptional and narrowly-tailored use of surveillance. But that is all the more reason to safeguard human rights and fundamental freedoms.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

Our movements and feelings are constantly monitored, because surveillance is the business model of the digital age.

If surveillance, censorship and propaganda are the three pillars of authoritarianism, information, organization and leverage are the counter-pillars of citizen power. And the Internet provides the best and most appropriate infrastructure for strengthening all three.

Police in Washington D.C. are now using cameras to catch drivers who go through red lights. Many congressmen this week opposed the use of the red light cameras incorrectly assuming they were being used for surveillance at local brothels.

I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.

Surveillance induced morality: relics of cultural retardation.

On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department's top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.

One of the few things the Air Force did admit to me existed out there presently without admitting that it was Area 51 is this drone called the 'Beast of Kandahar' which does not fire missiles, unlike the Predator and the Reaper, but just conducts surveillance.

Incidentally, our railroad facilities are under video surveillance by the federal police. However, the federal and state governments will have to determine whether video surveillance shouldn't be significantly expanded to a certain degree.

China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.

If surveillance infiltrates our homes and personal relationships, that is a gross breach of our human and civil rights.

I think most people accept that it is necessary to have some surveillance in a democratic society. I think most people accept that it's important to have limits and clear safeguards on that.

Preventing surveillance of millions of people at a time is totally within our ability.

We long to have a home where civil freedoms are respected, where our children will not be subject to mass surveillance, abuse of human rights, political censorship and mass incarceration.

We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.

China's leaders seek to subordinate the rights of the individual to the will of the Communist Party. They exert government control over companies and subvert the privacy and freedom of their citizens with an authoritarian surveillance state.

Surveillance cameras might reduce crime - even though the evidence here is mixed - but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved.