Trevor Paglen's Quotes

The most famous secret base, I guess, would be Area 51, which a lot of people have heard of as a kind of mythical place. Well, it's a real place.

Trevor Paglen

For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.

Trevor Paglen

In the very near future, I guarantee that the pictures you post on social media will affect your credit rating, health and auto insurance policies, and much more. It will all happen automatically. In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures. What's at stake, obviously, is the future of the human race!

Trevor Paglen

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

Trevor Paglen

Before Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion in the 4th Century, 'mystery religions,' organized around a central canon of secret knowledge, were widespread. Membership in such religions was limited to people who had passed through secret initiation rituals and had begun to learn a body of hidden knowledge.

Trevor Paglen

American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.

Trevor Paglen

Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better.

Trevor Paglen