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
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.
In practice
In a discussion about privacy laws and government authority.
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.
Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.
My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
China may censor YouTube. China may censor Twitter. They won't be able to censor Bitcoin. There's no central authority. There's no one you can go to and say, 'We're going to turn Bitcoin off.'
Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers.
Technology is, in many respects, an enabler for an open, transparent society. But it's also an enabler for supervision to a completely unforeseen degree. And for commercialising personal space to an unforeseen degree.
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