From Joe DeRouen's Book of Quotes...
"You are all optimizing against the imaginable, not the probable. And the
imaginable, especially the imaginable evil, has no inertia at all. There
is no limit to what it might do and therefore, there is no limit to what one
must do to prevent it...If we are to design all of our policies around the
worst thing that could possibly happen, if we are trying to achieve a
world of such absolute safety that no one in power can ever be blamed for
a human-caused catastrophe, we will have to endow law enforcement with
powers of surveillance which will make a police state not just imaginable
but probable."
- EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, in a letter to Administration staffers
regarding the Clipper and Digital Telephony surveillance scheme, on
which the Administration refused to back down, citing fear of terrorists
using untappable communications to plan a nuclear bombing of the
World Trade Center, and the reaction the voting public would have
toward the Adminstration in the event of such terrorism.
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