🚀 go-pugleaf

denning@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu (Dorothy Denning) writes:
>[. . .]
>If I can't walk through some park, say, without a reasonable expectation of
>safety, I lose some liberty to move about freely.  [. . .]
>Society is a contract which requires a lot of give and take.

These are valid concerns.  People have argued about where to draw the
line between your rights and my rights for centuries, and we're not
going to come up with the definitive answer here, either.

The clever thing that happened a little over 200 years ago in Phila-
delphia, however, is that a bunch of people came up with a dramatic
new way of drawing the line between our rights and the government's
right.  Namely, we have the rights.  The government gets only those
rights which we collectively decide to cede to it.

I agree with you that the government has the right, and indeed the
duty, to ensure that both of us, and our children, can safely walk
through the park of our choice.  But that doesn't make me want it to
be any easier for the government to read my private correspondence,
just on the off chance that I might be discussing something the
government doesn't like.

-- George Mitchell (george@tessi.com)