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EFF Quotes Collection 5.0 (Mar. 9, 1995)
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Date: Wed, 8 Mar 1995 12:17:00 -0500 (EST)
From: Stanton McCandlish
EFF Quotes of the Week Collection 5.0
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Updated: Mar. 9, 1995
A collection of the wittiest and stupidest, most sublime and most inane comments ever said or written about cryptography, civil liberties, networking, government, privacy, and more.
For more information on the Electronic Fronter Foundation, Clipper, Digital Telephony, and related civil liberties issues, contact EFF via the Internet, phone, fax, or US Mail.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
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"Is this true or only clever?"
* Augustine Birrell
"...some starry eyed individuals who access the Net think of Cyberspace as a community, with rules, regulations and codes of behaviour. Don't you believe it! There is no community. Perhaps there was some truth in that concept in the past, when the Internet was used exclusively by a small, homogeneous group of academics and corporate technical researchers. Today, with Internet access available to everyone, Iway travellers reflect every heterogeneous nuance of the world population. Along your journey, someone may try to tell you that in order to be a good Net "citizen", you must follow the rules of the Cyberspace community. Don't listen. The only laws and rules with which you should concern yourself are those passed by the country, state and city in which you live. The only ethics you should adopt as you pursue wealth on the Iway are those dictated by the religious faith you have chosen to follow and your own good conscience."
* Laurence Canter & Martha Siegel ("the Green Card Lawyers"), from an early review copy of their book, How To Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway, 1994.
"Any time you throw information from the Internet at a student, you have to filter it."
* Steve Shotwell, director of computer services for the Troy, Michigan school district.
"Trying to control information in the network age is about as successful as pissing into the wind."
* Keith Henson, in an article on the AABBS prosecution, Computer underground Digest, Jan. 21, 1995.
"A means of control should exist whereby access operators and their organizations are held responsible for what is posted on the Internet,"
* Church of Scientology lawyer Helena Kobrin
"If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be...if we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."
* Thomas Jefferson
"I don't understand why they call it public broadcasting. As far as I am concerned, there's nothing public about it; it's an elitist enterprise. `Rush Limbaugh' is public broadcasting."
* Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich on the de-funding of the Public Broadcasting System, as quoted by Broadcasting and Cable, Feb. 20, 1995, p. 8
"The Internet is a conduit of criminal activity."
* James P. Lennane, president of software company DeScribe Inc., who in Oct. 1994 offered a $20,000 reward for the turning in of certain software pirates, whom Microsoft also offered a $10,000 bounty on.
"First of all, you have to make the distinction between the Internet and some commercial service like AOL or Prodigy. If you spend that time and money building internets, you at the end of your labors will own tangible assets: hardware, software, paid-for network bandwidth, and human capital in the form of people who know how to run same. Spending those dimes on Prodigy means that in the end you will have rented someone else's assets and will have nothing concrete in the end except for receipts for bills paid."
* Edward Vielmetti of MSEN
"That will change over time the entire flow of information and the entire quality of knowledge in the country and it will change the way people will try to play games in the legislative process."
* Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, on increasing public electronic access to Congressional Information (as reported by BNA Daily Report for Executives, Nov. 22, 1994)
"John [Malone, of cable tv giant TCI] and I were just on a Networked Economy Conference panel together, and we were standing at the urinals talking about things, and Barry Diller comes in and stands between us. And Barry says, `C'mon, you seem like such good friends. Just split the difference.'"
* Bell Atlantic CEO Ray Smith, on the failed BA/TCI "NII" merger, reported in Wired, Feb. 1995, p. 110
"...Don't mistake any of this for altruism...Fear and greed just doesn't work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better."
* Larry Edison, CEO of Oracle, on the company's improved customer service; reported in Investor's Business Daily, Feb. 22, 1995, p. A2
"Networks are based on choice. When they get uncomfortable, it's easy to opt out of them. Communities teach tolerance, co-existence, and mutual respect...I fear that calling a network a community leads people to complacency and delusion, to accepting an inadequate substitute because they've never experienced the real thing and they don't know what they're missing."
* Eric Utne, publisher of Utne Reader, from Utne_Reader, Mar.-Apr. 1995, p. 3
"If I knew what you've made during the year, if I know what your withholding is, if I know what your spending pattern is, I should be able to generate for you a tax return. I am an excellent advocate of return-free filing. We know everything about you that we need to know. Your employer tells us everything about you that we need to know. Your activity records on your credit cards tell us everything about you that we need to know. Through interface with Social Security, with the DMV, with your banking institutions, we really have a lot of information ... We could literally file a return for you. This is the future we'd like to go to."
* US Internal Revenue Service Document Processing System project manager, as reported by Wired, Dec. 1994, p. 174.
"I think intellectual property is more like land, and copyright violation is more like trespass. Even though you don't take anything away from the landowner when you trespass, most people understand and respect the laws that make it illegal. The real crime in copyright violation is not the making of the copies, it's the expropriation of the creator's right to control the creation."
* Founder of ClariNet Communications Corp., Internet World, Nov/Dec. 1994, p.64)
"E-mail someday will unite us all in a shared state of epistolary bliss. E-mail is ethereal; it consumes no paper, no ink, and only a misting of fossil fuels. E-mail is nearly instantaneous. Best of all, e-mail combines the vacuity of phone talk with the potential permanence of letters. A fledgling still, e-mail promises to burgeon beyond anyone's calculation. Maybe the letter's golden age isn't dead after all; it may be yet to come."
* an op-ed piece in the Nov. 9, 1994 Wall Street Journal
"Laws do not persuade just because they threaten."
* Seneca, 65 CE
"Nothing we do in this great capital can change the fact that factories or information can flash across the world, that people can move money around in the blink of an eye...Nothing can change the fact that technology can be adopted, once created, by people all across the world and then rapidly adapted in new and different ways by people who have a little different take on the way that technology works."
* William Clinton, President of the United States, in a New York Times article by John Markoff, Sep. 21, 1993 [Note how inconsistent this statement is with the Clinton Administration's policy efforts to stuff the encryption genie back in the bottle.]
"The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously."
* Hubert H. Humphrey
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
* Gene Spafford, 1992, quoted in a Joel Snyder article in Internet World, Nov/Dec 1994, p.94
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
* Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
"Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them."
* Lily Tomlin
"Any vagabond babbler or unacknowledged genius, any enterprising tradesman, with his own money or with the money of others, may found a newspaper, even a great newspaper. He may attract a host of writers, ready to deliver judgment on any subject at a moment's notice; he may hire illiterate reporters to keep him supplied with rumors and scandals. His staff is then complete. From that day he sits in judgement on all the world, on ministers and administrators, on literature and art, on finance and industry."
* K.P. Pobyedonostseff, Reflections of a Russian Statesman (tr. Robert Long)
"I'd rather have 10% of the world than 100% of New England."
* President of Nynex, the New England local telephone monopoly, on telecom deregulation, as reported in Business Week, Feb. 20, 1995, p. 92
"If you think the 13,000 guys at Microsoft who aren't millionaires yet are going to show some restraint, you're in for a surprise."
* Andy Nicholson of Microsoft, in response to America On-Line CEO Steve Case's comment that Microsoft should show some restraint in the online market.
"If I have a market in the U.S., I have 200 to 250 million guys all speaking the same language, all paying in dollars, and all reading the same magazines. The natural hub of the industry is the United States. Whether the Japanese or the Europeans like to hear this or not, it's the truth."
* Expatriate Belgian CEO of TechGnosis, a software company now based in the US.
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
* Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is a First Amendment right to speak in a encrypted way...The right to speak P.G.P. is like the right to speak Navajo. The Government has no particular right to prevent you from speaking in a technical manner even if it is inconvenient for them to understand."
* Eben Moglen, Columbia U. professor of law and legal history, in a New York Times article by John Markoff, Sep. 21, 1993
"The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea."
* Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world."
* Esther Dyson, EFF Boardmember, from Jan. 14. 1994 Economist article
"Grassroots can grow through concrete."
* Jim DePoe
"Philosophical habits of mind do not come quicker through fiber optics. Clear thinking is not aided by better dot resolution. Understanding ourselves and feeling for others does not come with a software upgrade."
* Linda Ray Pratt
"When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us."
* Alexander Graham Bell
"[R]espondents [to an Internet survey] reported a more active civic life in cyberspace than is typically reported by respondents in the national election studies (NES) of Center for Political Studies of the University of Michigan. Even though the technology is new, close to one-third had used e-mail to contact a public official. This compares to an estimated 28 percent of the NES who reported ever having written a letter to a public official during the 1960 and 70s...About 60 percent had been asked to petition or otherwise contact a public official about an issue or public policy."
* Bonnie Fisher, Michael Margolis, David Resnick, "Democracy on the Internet" Survey Results, as presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in New York City, Sept. 1-4, 1994
"Knowledge of history is the precondition of political intelligence. Without history, a society shares no common memory of where it has been [or] what it core values are."
* 'National Standards for United States History' as reprinted in Time, Nov. 7, 1994
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue."
* Barry Goldwater
"When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping...Jay Forrester has demonstrated it mathematically, with his computer models of cities in which he makes clear that whatever you propose to do, based on common sense, will almost inevitably make matters worse rather than better. You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obliged to understand, in detail, the whole system, and for very large systems you can't do this without a very large computer. Even then, the safest course seems to be to stand by and wring hands, but not to touch...Intervening is a way of causing trouble."
* Lewis Thomas, from the essay "On Meddling", The Medusa and the Snail, Viking Pr., New York, 1979
"I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my freind, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
* E. M. Forster
"One practice which I believe should be eliminated is that of the so-called 'paper front'. A client is advised to finance an 'organization' to promote or fight for its cause under the guise of an independent and spontaneous movement. This is a plain public deceit and fraud...Attempts to fool the public by making it believe an 'organization' existing only on paper is really a vociferous group favoring this or that cause have helped to cast a shadow upon the business of public relations counseling."
* John W. Hill, The Making of a Public Relations Man
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery!?"
* Patrick Henry
"The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human."
* John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2000
"In a Time/CNN poll of 1,000 Americans conducted last week by Yankelovich Partners, two-thirds said it was more important to protect the privacy of phone calls than to preserve the ability of police to conduct wiretaps. When informed about the Clipper Chip, 80% said they opposed it."
* Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "Who Should Keep the Keys", TIME, Mar. 14 1994
[note: these statistics have since been called into question. Even so, they are unlikely to be off by very MUCH...]
"Many thanks to those of you who flamed the PC [Progressive Conservative party] pranksters. I know when I went online that I would have to deal with fake posts and related chaff. That's the price of being on the Net. I'm not about to delete my account. I still want to hear from people with real concerns and real suggestions".
* Robert Rae, Premier of Ontario, Canada, in a post to the Usenet newsgroup ont.general, thanking supporters for verbally attacking PC party leader Mike Harris, who referred to an obviously forged message from a fake Bob Rae as an embarassing "security violation" and the forgers themselves. From a K.K. Campbell article in eye Weekly. [If major figures of government are encouraging flaming, netiquette still has a long way to go...]
"Time makes more converts than reason."
* Thomas Paine
"A Gallup poll reveals nearly 85% of Canadians worry the info-highway will be a threat to their privacy, but 54.9% are still willing to pay up to $15 monthly to be hooked into it. The info-highway received a 54% recognition rating, a figure described as "astounding" by Anderson Consulting, which sponsored the survey. 58.7% were interested in educational services, but only 21.3% in home shopping and 16.4% in calling up video games."
* _Toronto_Globe_&Mail, "Snoopophobia Haunts Info-Highway" May 3, 1994
"Maybe we need a tax credit for the poorest Americans to buy a laptop. Now, maybe that's wrong, maybe that's expensive, maybe we can't do it, but I'll tell you, any signal that we can send to the poorest Americans that says, 'We're going into a 21st century, third-wave information age, and so are you, and we want to carry you with us.'"
* Rep. Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives addressing the House Ways and Means Committee, Jan. 1995. [From New York Times, Jan. 5, 1995, excerpted in Edupage, Jan. 8, 1995.]
"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds."
* John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder, Decrypting the Puzzle Palace
"Only through intelligent utilization of interactive multimedia technology can we make higher education simultaneously more productive and more efficient."
* Bernard Gifford, software entrepreneur, quoted in Educom Review, Nov./ Dec., 1994
"California legislators consider 10 to 15 letters and faxes to be a strong showing of support for a bill (in a state of 31-million population!)"
* Jim Warren, GovAccess Internet newsletter, 08/04/94
"It is almost impossible for anyone outside this damn beltway to really understand how the Congress works. If you aren't here, walking the halls of Congress, sitting at bars and attending parties where you get to knock back some brews with Hill staffers, you don't have a handle on the almost numbing amount of bullshit that goes on."
* CWD and _Comm_Daily_ journalist Brock Meeks, post to com-priv mailing list forum, 10/22/94
"'If you want me to tell you that our money buys us a vote on a particular bill at a particular time, I say: `Fuck You,` it doesn't,' according to a prominent lobbyist for one of the regional telephone companies.
"'However, if you ask me, `Do we get better access because of a couple of $1,000 checks?` I'll guarantee you that two grand gets us in the door and gets our telephone calls returned before Joe Blow from the home office,' he said. 'And it sure as hell gets our calls returned before yours.'"
* Brock Meeks, CyberWire Dispatch, 2nd issue of 11/08/94
"There are at least four big barriers to the NII. One is outdated and compartmentalized regulations governing telecommunication, cable broadcasting, and information industries. Another is legal issues concerning copyright, intellectual property, and security. The third is standards and the interoperability of the various NII technologies. And the last is the development of new structures for commerce and business activities on the NII, including billing and payment for services rendered,"
* president of WilTel, Inc., as reported in Telecommunications, Nov. 1994, p. 29
"It's amazing where capitalism has boomed in the last couple of years. First the Eastern Bloc, and now the last bastion of socialism -- the Internet itself."
* the Chairman of Delphi Internet Services Corp., as reported by Information Week, 10/24/94
"E-mail is reincarnating the age of letter writing. We're keeping in touch the way the Victorians did, building a personal community connected by a constant stream of letters sharing news and gossip. E-mail is reviving the 'letter' as a forum for wit, style, and personality, as well as serving as an invaluable business tool."
* Leslie Schroeder, Silicon Valley PR consultant to high-tech companies, from Computer_underground_Digest interview by David Batterson, Oct. 1994
"Every advance in civilization has been denounced while it was still recent."
* Bertrand Russell
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