What if we could build a society where the information was never collected?  Where you could pay to rent a video without leaving a credit card number or a bank number?  Where you could prove you're certified to drive without ever giving your name?  Where you could send and receive messages without revealing your physical location, like an electronic post office box?

That's the kind of society I want to build.  I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves things like real privacy of personal communications.  Encryption strong enough that even the NSA can't break it.  We already know how.  But we're not applying it.  We also need better protocols for mobile communication that can't be tracked.

John Gilmore
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, March 28,1991