Jim Harper Quotations

What we're seeing is just the start of a trend in which government prosecutors will use (Internet) search results in criminal investigations.

The place to control what is displayed on a home computer screen is in the home. It's up to parents -- not the government -- to control what kids see online.

On the other level, it communicates to companies directly that this is something that matters, and they need to have policies on point. They need to decide for themselves that we only share data subject to legitimate legal processes, and we don't share data informally, and we defend the privacy of our customers.

Having a national ID would promote a surveillance society that we should all dread.

Criminals don't realize that when they have a single piece of mail that's stolen, they can get sentenced up to five years in prison--and up to 250 thousand dollar fine. And that's pretty serious.

I understand that the directive may conflict with national laws, such as the German Constitution. There will be many more interesting twists and turns before it is put into full effect. Hopefully, for the sake of Europeans, it never will be. This shows how European law serves the interests of governments and bureaucrats much more than the European people. The error of entrusting privacy protection to government officials is becoming startlingly clear there.

You've got to remember the entire picture. The technology allows more good from the good people than bad from the bad people. It has immense positive consequences.

This is a symbol of what's to come - that is, the government expecting to be able to dip into private databases to do all kind of surveillance and research.

This is the camel's nose under the tent for using search engines and all kinds of data aggregators as surveillance tools.

They should definitely abide by their privacy policies. The irony is rich.

It's a classic mission-creep situation. These guys are playing a great law and order game . . . and in the process creating a database that could be converted into something quite dangerous.

The Internet is an agreement to use a small number of communications protocols, and it needs almost no governance at all.

The camel's nose may be smaller, but it's still sneaking under the tent.

I'm excited because we have never before in the 10 years of effort that many people have been putting into this, we have never had so many pieces working together.

It helps in two ways. One, it's going to cause consumers to think twice. They're going to say, now, what is happening? They'll read privacy policies. They'll decide not to do business with companies that share data willy-nilly.

The common idea that the cost of data storage is rapidly becoming zero is plainly wrong when you are talking about terabytes of data. It will cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to securely store the data in usable form. Europeans will end up paying a great deal more for communications so their privacy can be undone.

All the people who thought that Europe was a haven of privacy need to think again. Europe is making great strides toward building a corporate-government surveillance axis with this mandate. This untargeted, general warrant to search the population is probably appealing to law enforcement interests.