Richard A. Posner Quotes
We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.
He was referring to all the data that health insurance companies, retail stores, vendors such as Amazon.com, credit reporting companies, maintain on most Americans. He made the pint that private sources maintain much more private information on Americans than does the government. People acquiesce as they perceive some benefit.
Richard A. Posner, Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Seminar, Chicago Center, June 3, 2006
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Critics of NSA observe that there is a fundamental difference between government invasion of privacy and that of corporations in that the Government can deprive a citizen of his/her liberty or even life while corporations can just invade their privacy, embarrass them, or hurt their economic status. Counter-critics rejoinder is that 99 percent of all the specific abuses of privacy and damages to citizens in the U. S. from massive data collection are made by private corporations, not the NSA or other government agencies.
In Russia, with its authoritarian tradition and secret police, people have little expectation of privacy. Kaspersky was here referring to Europe and America as well as Russia.
The Swedish Pirate Party is devoted to the abolition of copyright and government or control of communications of any kind.
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.
The large credit reporting and data gathering companies collected information on Americans without their consent and then sold their information through “data brokers” to companies who would then try and sell products and services based on the information they obtained. In many cases the brokers sold the information to fraudulent operations who swindled or committed fraud against the names they bought. When members of Congress investigated the industry, the companies who collected the data claimed that they had no idea that there were consumer rip offs they were facilitating and claimed to have “rules” that prevented such use. But they said that they could not possibly know what the data brokers were doing as they were independent companies.
The FBI had obtained a court order requiring apple to write software that could hack into a person's iPhone. Apple, with most other hi-tech companies in support, filed a motion with the court opposing the order. The FBI shortly thereafter withdrew its request for the order saying that they had found other solutions, when they had originally told the court that there were no other solutions.
Richard Allen Posner is an American jurist and economist who is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Between 1981 and 2017, he served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. He is a leading figure in the field of law and economics, and was identified by The Journal of Legal Studies as the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.
