John Paul Stevens Quotes
Of course, when I joined the Navy and when I took up the correspondence course in cryptography, I had to sign an oath that I would never reveal what sort of work I was involved in. It was only some years after the war that Congress passed a statute relieving me of that obligation.
Stevens, John Paul. The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years. Little, Brown and Company, 2019.
The chairman resigned in protest over the refusal of the government to declassify historical documents years after the events.
The Great Depression was afflicting the nation. Farmers and homeowners who lost jobs (over 35%) or could not sell produce at a decent price could not pay their mortgage debts and homes and farms were being foreclosed in record numbers. Veterans who had saved the nation in WWI and farmers who had fed the population were impoverished and homeless. Rankin appealed to President Herbert Hoover to place a moratorium in bank foreclosures, which not only ruined the individuals but drove down the value of real estate by throwing so much on the market at a time when few had money to buy. Hoover, an otherwise decent man and an excellent administrator, had a blind spot and would not consider having the government solve or alleviate any of these problems as he felt that this would be bad for the national character. By 1932, the voters threw Hoover out and elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt who used the power of government in new and imaginative ways, improved the economy. Profided relief, and prevented a popular revolution and many believed saved capitalism from its own excesses.
He had developed a mathematical algorithm for a computer encryption that would take years to break even for the most powerful supercomputers. The U. S. Government tried to prevent him from publishing the technique and formula, but he went ahead anyway. They then tried to accuse him of violating an Arms Export Control Act for allowing people in other countries to see it, but there were no legal grounds for indictment. The strong encryption method, PGP, can be used with almost any PC and internet transmission of files.
There have been dozens of serious nuclear accidents almost all of which were withheld from the public and even many of the civilian scientists who were trying to make the bombs error proof, but who did not know the details of the kinds of human errors that were being committed. The motivations for the secrecy were multiple. There was the usual one of saving the military from embarrassment which is typical throughout the government where they have the right to classify information. But another reason was the military leaders did not want the civilians to regain control. See {637984}. Perhaps most important, they did not want to provide ammunition for the anti-nuclear movement to have the incidents with which they could scare the public and erode public support for a large nuclear weapons program.
John Paul Stevens was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1975 until his voluntary retirement in 2010. At the time of his retirement, he was the second-oldest-serving justice in the history of the court and the third-longest-serving justice. At the time of his death, he was the longest lived Supreme Court justice ever. His long tenure saw him write for the court on most issues of American law, including civil liberties, death penalty, government action and intellectual property. In cases involving presidents of the United States, he wrote for the court that they were to be held accountable under American law. A registered Republican when appointed who throughout his life identified as a conservative, Stevens was considered to have been on the liberal side of the court at the time of his retirement.
