Political Quotes

“Madam President, a question: Do we want a government surveillance state in the United States of America? Movies like ``Gattaca,'' where citizens are tracked through their DNA, or ``Minority Report,'' where citizens are tracked through their retina scan, warn us what can happen under a fictional government surveillance state. But we don't need to depend upon movies and fiction to understand what a surveillance state means because we have, right now, a real-life government surveillance state in China. China's government surveillance state already tracks more than 1 million Uighur citizens through facial recognition. As cochair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, I have had a front-row seat on how China uses facial recognition technology to track and to enslave a million people. And I have watched with some alarm as the U.S. Government has begun to expand its own use of facial recognition technology tied to databases, especially because there has never been a debate, let alone a vote, here in the U.S. Senate about whether or not we want to have a national facial recognition system controlled by the government. We have never had a debate related to the risks that that involves in terms of its potential threat to our freedom and to our privacy. So I want to force there to be such a debate. I want to force there to be a vote. A government with power to track us everywhere we go is a real threat to privacy, a real threat to freedom.…”