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Personal privacy is a closely held American value.

In exchange for power, influence, command and a place in history, a president gives up the bulk of his privacy.

Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere.

Privacy is tremendously important. I believe the American people, and all people, should be skeptical of government power, should ask hard questions: What is the authority? What is the oversight? That's the way it ought to be.

This has been a learning experience for me. I also thought that privacy was something we were granted in the Constitution. I have learned from this when in fact the word privacy does not appear in the Constitution.

The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.

I suspect privacy is a very new concept to humanity.

From the moment I walked into the White House, it was as if I had no privacy at all.

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.