“Any monitoring system that is invisible, pervasive, automatic, and permanent gives those in power the means to create a modern surveillance state.”

— John Twelve Hawks

Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of Surveillance States (2014)
Context: Any monitoring system that is invisible, pervasive, automatic, and permanent gives those in power the means to create a modern surveillance state. And these new states will have an authority that has detached itself from ethics and ideology. Politicians and dictators will continue to make speeches, but their words will become meaningless. This new system will see and know us. It will even predict our future behavior.

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John Twelve Hawks 62

American writer

John Twelve Hawks American writer

Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of Surveillance States (2014)

“Surveillance today is a means of sorting and classifying populations and not just of invading personal space or violating the privacy of individuals. In postmodernizing contexts surveillance is an increasingly powerful means of reinforcing social divisions, as the superpanoptic sort relentlessly screens, monitors and classifies to determine eligibility and access, to include and to exclude.”

David Lyon (1948) British sociologist

§9, p. 151
Surveillance society

“Democracy is a form of leading state in which the right and power in the hands of the people as a permanent. To ensure that the right and power is in the hands of people permanently, it must have a system to ensure the balance of power between citizens with its representatives.”

Khem Veasna (1971) Cambodian politician

Multi-Parties political platform (25 June 2013)

“Hence, political exposure in themselves serve as a powerful instrument for disintegrating the system we oppose, the means for diverting from he enemy his casual or temporary allies, the means for spreading enmity and distrust among those who permanently share power with the autocracy.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section E, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

“Create the conditions for people to criticize the Government, to monitor the government, and at the same time to give full play to the supervisory role of the news media, so that the power to run under sunshine.(”

Wen Jiabao (1942) former Premier of the People's Republic of China

Wen Jiabao (2010) cited in: Government Work Report, National People's Congress cited in 如何「讓權力在陽光下運行」, 28 September 2008, BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/trad/china/2010/03/100308_china_media_liu.shtml,

“Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, page 94.
No Place to Hide (2014)

“But all of us understand that the standards for government surveillance must be higher. Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Review of Signals Intelligence Speech (June 2014)
Context: There was a recognition by all who participated in these reviews that the challenges to our privacy do not come from government alone. Corporations of all shapes and sizes track what you buy, store and analyze our data, and use it for commercial purposes; that’s how those targeted ads pop up on your computer and your smartphone periodically. But all of us understand that the standards for government surveillance must be higher. Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power.

“No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

2014
Source: theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript

“An omnipresent surveillance state … makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

29:29
“ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“The fundamental, all-pervasive cause of world instability is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neuroses and psychoses. The technological acceleration of transportation, communication and weapons systems is now creating power areas wider than existing political structures.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“Any monitoring system that is invisible, pervasive, automatic, and permanent gives those in power the means to create a modern surveillance state.”

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