Politics & Power Quote by Paul Gillmor

Safety is the moral solvent Paul Gillmor pours over a very specific kind of government power: public exposure. The line doesn’t merely argue for tracking “dangerous criminals”; it insists on “unfettered access” and turns information into a weapon meant to reassure “our loved ones.” That opening phrase is the rhetorical shield. Who wants to be cast as opposing protection? By framing the issue as family defense, Gillmor pre-emptively pushes critics into an ugly corner: if you worry about civil liberties, you must not care about children.

The operative move is the fusion of two audiences into one mandate. “We” (lawmakers) must “provide” (grant) the public a right to know, as if the public’s role is enforcement-by-awareness. The subtext is that surveillance is most effective when crowdsourced: shame, social exclusion, and vigilant neighborliness become part of the penal system. “Who these dangerous criminals are and where they are living” doesn’t sound like due process; it sounds like permanent status, a life sentence of being locatable.

Context matters: Gillmor, an Ohio Republican, spoke in an era when sex offender registries and notification laws expanded rapidly, fueled by high-profile crimes and a politics that rewarded “tough on crime” certainty over messy nuance. “Unfettered” is doing the ideological heavy lifting: it rejects balancing tests, exceptions, and the idea that some information can be misused. The quote works because it swaps a complicated policy debate (recidivism, rehabilitation, collateral harm, constitutional limits) for a crisp binary: transparency equals protection, restraint equals risk. It’s persuasive precisely because it’s emotionally asymmetric; the costs are abstract, but the fear is intimate.