Timothy Garton Ash Quotes
In a democracy it is ultimately for us, the citizens, to judge where to place the balance between security and privacy, safety and liberty. It's our lives and liberties that are threatened, not only by terrorism but also by massive depredations of our privacy in the name of counter-terrorism. If those companies from which governments actually take most of our intimate details want to show that they are still on the side of the angels, they had better join this struggle for transparency too.
Ash, Timothy Garton. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Yale University Press, 2016.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The intelligence and law enforcement advocates of reducing privacy rights so that law enforcement can prevent acts of terrorism frame the question as a tradeoff between civil right and safety. However, as Leahy and many others point out, we would not be much safer if we gave up all our ivil rights. Further, hundreds of thousands of American have given their lives so that we would have those civil rights. Without them what are we protecting.
This quotation is particularly interesting when compared with {633126} that he said in his First Inaugural Address. His idealism was tempered some by his first 4 years in the Presidency.
While this sounds good, in Taiwan it is not clear that the Premier has any authority over the intelligence agencies that is meaningful. Even in the United States Major intelligence leaders have lied to Presidents and the Congress about their clearly illegal activities, and many sceptics suggest that the Premier would have no way of knowing what his intelligence agencies are actually doing.
The NSA had been publicly exposed (by the Edward Snowden leaks) as collecting data on virtually every American’s phone and on-line conversation, and criticism was rampant.
People at both ends of this polarized issue had deep suspicions of people at the other pole.
In the face of terror bombings, Britain passed some anti-terror laws which also somewhat infringed on civil rights, liberty and privacy.
Timothy Garton Ash CMG FRSA is a British historian, author and commentator. He is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe.
