The Privacy Law Quotes

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused. ~ Richard Perle

The incentive for digging up gossip has become so great that people will break the law for the opportunity to take that picture. Then it crosses the line into invasion of privacy. The thing that's really bad about it, though, is that the tabloids don't tell the truth. ~ Vince Vaughn

We cannot deny that our decision today will have an impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime. Cell phones have become important tools in facilitating coordination and communication among members of criminal enterprises, and can provide valuable incriminating information about dangerous criminals. Privacy comes at a cost. ~ John Roberts

We need to protect the privacy rights of all Americans, and that means stopping the federal government from spying on the cellphones and emails of law-abiding citizens. ~ Ted Cruz

Nothing that we have authorized conflicts with any law regarding privacy or any provision of the constitution. ~ John Ashcroft

The FBI wanted us to introduce the 1994 Digital Telephony bill today and I said absolutely not. They have to understand they have a Vermonter as the Chairman Of the Technology and Law committee and that we Vermonters respect our privacy. ~ Patrick Leahy

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. ~ Michelle Alexander

People will always want intimacy with one chosen person and you cannot have intimacy without privacy, which is why couples draw circles of privacy around themselves. They demand that family, neighbors and the law respect their union, and that is why we have marriage. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I cannot believe we want our great nation to become a land where our personal privacy and our personal freedom are jeopardized by the abuse of power by a police official who seems to believe he is a law unto himself ~ George McGovern ~ Anthony Summers

Let me tell you something, Johnny. And don't you ever forget this. Men make their own puny little laws for the courts. Men bend those laws, break them, change them, corrupt them, turn them to their own use. But there are other laws. Basic laws. And the strongest law of all is survival. When your honor, your family, your home, your privacy, are threatened, you have to think of how you'll answer to your God. And to hell with men's chickenshit little laws. ~ Leonard Sanders

The real reason for withholding taxes is the unwillingness of workers to share their incomes with the government and the consequent difficulties of collection. To overcome this handicap, the government has simply impressed employers into its service as involuntary and unpaid tax collectors. It is a form of conscription. Disregarding the right of privacy, which is an essential of liberty, the government's agents may, under the law, invade the employer's office, demand his accounts, and punish him for any infraction which they believe he has committed; they can impound his property and inflict a penalty for not having collected taxes for the government. ~ Frank Chodorov

I am told the settlement of $5 million I am being paid is the largest amount ever paid under the New York right to privacy law ~ Woody Allen

I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way. ~ Norman Lamm

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. ~ Ayn Rand

There's a a right to privacy for all individuals and all who have legal rights - and that includes the unborn. As an obstetrician, if I cause any harm to a fetus, I will be sued. If someone kills or harms a fetus they're liable in a court of law. ~ Ron Paul

If you look at the record and the enviable record which Sandra Day O'Connor has written, you find she was the fifth and decisive vote to safeguard Americans' right to privacy, to require our courtrooms to grant access to the disabled, to allow the federal government to pass laws to protect the environment, to preserve the right of universities to use affirmative action, to ban the execution of children in America. ~ Dick Durbin

We need to make sure that leaks of classified information, of national security secrets, needs to be rigorously pursued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. ~ John O. Brennan

The last refuge of privacy cannot be placed solely in law or technology. It must repose in both, and a thoughtful combination of the two can help us thread a path between having all our secrets trivially discoverable and preserving nothing for our later selves for fear of that discovery. ~ Jonathan Zittrain

I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life," Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article. But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not "own" the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed.
The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society's fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody's business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public's inviolable right to be diverted and an individual's wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world's careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse. ~ Janet Malcolm

Privacy is the very essence of human existence. One wonders why the Indian Supreme Court took so long to reach that conclusion. ~ Kalyan C. Kankanala

There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude. ~ Geoffrey Fisher

Of course, in the U.S. the government and politics are gaining more and more ground lately at the cost of the law. The government is very smart; it evokes terror in the hearts of people to convince them to give up their freedom and privacy. ~ Mohamedou Ould Slahi

No-knock police raids destroy Americans' right to privacy and safety. People's lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people's lives in order to control what others ingest. ~ James Bovard

As a result of this article, I was invited to testify in the Senate Judiciary Committee on privacy law. ~ Norman Lamm

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing privacy laws accomplish is making the bugs smaller. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

We followed the law, we follow our policies, we self-report, we identify problems, we fix them. And I think we do a great job, and we do, I think, more to protect people's civil liberties and privacy than they'll ever know. ~ Keith B. Alexander