Law enforcement was not supposed to be easy

In this day and age of the surveillance state, a quotation worth remembering from the legendary Orson Welles over 50 years back.

A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.

-- Charlton Heston as Mike Vargas in the movie "Touch of Evil"(1958),
Orson Welles (screenwriter and director)

Curiously, a similar statement was made over a decade back, in fact a couple of years before ⁹⁄₁₁, before the world changed, or actually before the United States’ war on terror changed the world.

We should not be building surveillance technology into standards. Law enforcement was not supposed to be easy. Where it is easy, it's called a police state.

-- Jeff Schiller, an IESG member and MIT network manager, Wired Magazine, 1999

(via Answer Girl and Steve Worona)