Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Perle

Perle’s line is built like a tripwire: it invites you to step from an agreeable premise into a hard policy conclusion before you’ve noticed the ground has shifted. “Law-abiding citizens value privacy” is the soft opening, pitched to anyone who considers themselves normal, decent, undeserving of suspicion. Then comes the pivot: “Terrorists require invisibility.” Not privacy, not even secrecy - invisibility, a word that smuggles in menace and absolute impunity. By the time he lands on “they should not be confused,” the audience is already nudged toward a moral sorting mechanism: privacy is legitimate when practiced by the right people, suspect when claimed by the wrong ones.

The intent is to preempt a recurring post-9/11 objection to surveillance: that expanding state visibility into private life endangers civil liberties. Perle reframes the argument so that “privacy” becomes a civic virtue while “invisibility” becomes an operational necessity of evil. The move is clever because it turns a technical debate (what powers should the state have, under what oversight?) into a semantic one (what do we call the thing you’re asking for?). Once the labels stick, the policy follows.

The subtext is a demand for deference: if you resist expanded monitoring, you’re not protecting rights; you’re muddying categories and, implicitly, helping the enemy hide. What’s left unsaid is the messy middle - journalists protecting sources, dissidents, domestic abuse survivors, ordinary people whose “privacy” looks like “invisibility” to a database. Perle’s sentence works by denying that middle exists. That denial is the argument.