Justice & Law Quote by Janet Reno

Janet Reno is doing a careful bit of rhetorical carpentry here: building a public consensus for stronger state power without ever saying the loud part out loud. The phrase "Everybody should want" isn’t just inclusive; it’s a soft coercion, the kind of civic commonsense framing that makes dissent sound like irresponsibility. You’re invited into a moral majority before the policy details even arrive.

Her word choice stitches together three goals that don’t always sit comfortably together: "investigate", "defend", and "bring people to justice". Investigation implies access. Defense implies readiness and capacity. Justice implies legitimacy. Put side by side, they create a chain of inevitability: if you care about security, you must accept the tools; if you accept the tools, you should accept their use; if you accept their use, you should accept their expansion. It’s a classic law-and-order logic updated for a domain that feels abstract to most people and therefore easier to narrate as exceptional.

The slightly clumsy "commit it" is revealing too: "cyber crimes" are plural, diffuse, and evolving, yet the sentence wants a single villain to hold. That simplification matters politically. In the 1990s, as the internet shifted from novelty to infrastructure, law enforcement faced a legitimacy problem: the public wanted the benefits of connectivity without the fear that came with it. Reno’s intent is to translate a technical arms race into a simple bargain: give us capability, and we’ll give you safety and accountability. The subtext is that capability means surveillance, stronger federal reach, and new precedents set in a space where the rules were still being written.