It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. - Bruce Schneier

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Against the average user, anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker, on the other hand, nothing works.

Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either.