Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

It is a long way from putting clips on wires to having government standards for electronic eavesdropping. How did this come about? Does wiretapping actually make us more secure?

In 2007, Congress legalized warrantless wiretapping; in 2008, it went a long step further, not only legalizing new wiretapping practices but also giving retroactive immunity to telephone companies that had colluded with the government in performing warrantless electronic eavesdropping.

We are moving from a world with a billion people connected to the Internet to one in which 10 or 100 times that many devices will be connected as well. Particularly in aggregation, the information reported by these devices will blanket the world with a network whose gaze is difficult to evade.

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

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

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

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.

A.O. Scott:

"The Lives of Others" illuminates ... the moral no man's land where base impulses and high principles converge.

Anthony Lane:

You might think that "The Lives of Others" is aimed solely at modern Germans. A movie this strong, however, is never parochial, nor is it period drama. Es ist fuer uns. It's for us.

Louis Menand:

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people's lives. They enjoy it excessively. It's not one of the species' more attractive addictions ...