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2007 March 16
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"I am not a number, I am a free man!" |
"The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable." |
"Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control
is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely
is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people
gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing
the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles
to untangle the errors of the errant machine." |
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2007 March 15
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"If you ask Americans whether they want an FBI wire tax in their phone bill, they'll say, “No.” If I ask them whether they want a feature on their telephone which allows me to find their child, if they're taken, they'll say, “Yes.” I think it's a question of perception." |
"Every man should know that his conversations,
his correspondence, and his personal life are private." |
"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.
"Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance
over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing
even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will
be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." |
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2007 March 14
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"From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance." |
"Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without
removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court,
and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most
intimate occurrences of the home." |
"All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing." |
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2007 March 13
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"The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away
by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be
of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins
to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which
government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life." |
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." |
"The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend.
It is one of the great landmarks in men’s struggle
to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized." |
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2007 March 12
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"If you want a Big Brother,
you get all that comes with it." |
"Some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy . . . The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups." |
"Choice by the people themselves is not
generally distinguished for its wisdom." |
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