I don't care who you love. If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn't have to hide who you are.
Ron WydenRead
Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the dangers of unchecked surveillance powers within a government system.
Ron Wyden warns that when a government has the tools to surveil its citizens without any legal accountability or oversight, it undermines democracy by allowing for disproportionate control and influence over the citizens and their freedoms. The lack of judicial checks can lead to abuses of power and a significant invasion of personal privacy.
Themes
SurveillanceGovernmentFreedomPrivacyAccountability
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about privacy laws and government authority.
More from Ron Wyden
All quotes →Similar quotes
The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.
Mitch KaporRead
If we do not learn to eliminate waste and to be more productive and more efficient in the ways we use energy, then we will fall short of this goal [for the Nation to derive 20 percent of all the energy we use from the Sun, by 2000]. But if we use our technological imagination, if we can work together to harness the light of the Sun, the power of the wind, and the strength of rushing streams, then we will succeed.
Jimmy CarterRead
I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.
Philip RothRead
It is dangerously destabilizing to have half the world on the cutting edge of technology while the other half struggles on the bare edge of survival.
William J. ClintonRead
Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.
Isaac AsimovRead
It is interesting to come across people who feel that a ghost communicating via a spell-checker is less far-fetched than a software glitch.
Mary RoachRead