At a news conference on Thursday devoted largely to
combating terror threats from the Islamic State,
Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies
marketing something expressly to allow people to hold
themselves beyond the law.”
The state and the law are separate entities, Mr. Comey. It concerns me that, in your mind, you have conflated the power of the state with the normativity of the law.
In the twentieth century, the modern state gained the power to destroy all life on Earth. In the twenty-first century, the modern state and the modern citizen gained the power of private machine-assisted telepathy, memory, and computation. The state and its avatars must recognize that it cannot and must not have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if it wishes to foster a healthy and free society.
In the twentieth century, the modern state gained the power to destroy all life on Earth. In the twenty-first century, the modern state and the modern citizen gained the power of private machine-assisted telepathy, memory, and computation. The state and its avatars must recognize that it cannot and must not have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if it wishes to foster a healthy and free society.