"You are all optimizing against the imaginable, not the probable. And the imaginable, especially the imaginable evil, has no inertia at all. There is no limit to what it might do and therefore, there is no limit to what one must do to prevent it...If we are to design all of our policies around the worst thing that could possibly happen, if we are trying to achieve a world of such absolute safety that no one in power can ever be blamed for a human-caused catastrophe, we will have to endow law enforcement with powers of surveillance which will make a police state not just imaginable but probable."
« EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, in a letter to Administration staffers regarding the Clipper and Digital Telephony surveillance scheme, on which the Administration refused to back down, citing fear of terrorists using untappable communications to plan a nuclear bombing of the World Trade Center, and the reaction the voting public would have toward the Adminstration in the event of such terrorism. »