Daily Archives: February 18, 2012

RQ149

“When paranoids examine powerful monitoring technologies such as the Clipper chip and DNA scans, they see only the Orwellian potentials–and will not grant the government any legitimate rights to intrude upon the private lives of citizens. One needn’t be a certified paranoid, however, to see problems near at hand. Observing the government’s sophisticated techniques for intelligence gathering, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote that ‘We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government. The aggressive breaches of privacy by the government increase by geometric proportions.’ When a justice of the Supreme Court voices such concerns, we all may be forgiven a touch of paranoia.”

–Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Sixth edition. New York: Longman, 1997. Quote on page 422.