"If information ends up in the wrong hands, the lives of people very often are immediately at risk"
About this Quote
The menace in de Vries's line is its impatience. No lofty sermon about privacy, no abstract handwringing over “rights.” Just a blunt causal chain: information, mishandled, gets people hurt - quickly. That “immediately” is doing heavy lifting. It frames data not as an asset to be optimized, but as a weapon that can be turned in seconds, collapsing the distance between a spreadsheet and a body.
As a politician shaped by Europe’s post-9/11 security landscape (de Vries served as the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator in the mid-2000s), he’s speaking from a world where lists and leaks are operational: names of informants, addresses of dissidents, travel records, surveillance targets. The “wrong hands” phrase is deliberately elastic - it can mean terrorists, hostile states, criminal networks, or just reckless bureaucracies and vendors. That ambiguity is strategic. It widens the moral circle of blame without naming a single enemy, making the warning portable across contexts: intelligence sharing, police databases, migration systems, even corporate data breaches.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the casualness of modern information culture, including government culture. It’s also a preemptive argument for discipline: classification regimes, need-to-know access, careful data governance. At the same time, the line smuggles in a political dilemma: if information can endanger lives, then secrecy can be framed not as opacity but as protection. De Vries isn’t asking you to admire security; he’s asking you to fear carelessness - and to accept that, in certain domains, transparency has a body count.
As a politician shaped by Europe’s post-9/11 security landscape (de Vries served as the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator in the mid-2000s), he’s speaking from a world where lists and leaks are operational: names of informants, addresses of dissidents, travel records, surveillance targets. The “wrong hands” phrase is deliberately elastic - it can mean terrorists, hostile states, criminal networks, or just reckless bureaucracies and vendors. That ambiguity is strategic. It widens the moral circle of blame without naming a single enemy, making the warning portable across contexts: intelligence sharing, police databases, migration systems, even corporate data breaches.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the casualness of modern information culture, including government culture. It’s also a preemptive argument for discipline: classification regimes, need-to-know access, careful data governance. At the same time, the line smuggles in a political dilemma: if information can endanger lives, then secrecy can be framed not as opacity but as protection. De Vries isn’t asking you to admire security; he’s asking you to fear carelessness - and to accept that, in certain domains, transparency has a body count.
Quote Details
| Topic | Privacy & Cybersecurity |
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