Politics & Power Quote by Dorothy Denning

Denning’s line is a cold shower for anyone raised on the Silicon Valley myth that privacy was once a default setting and only recently got “broken.” Her intent is corrective, even disciplinary: stop romanticizing a lost era of sealed letters and untouchable phone calls. In the bureaucratic worldview she’s channeling, the baseline is not absolute privacy but conditional access governed by procedure. The key phrase is “appropriate court orders” - a legal shibboleth meant to reassure, but also to narrow the debate. If access is already normalized, then the argument shifts from “Should the state be able to see?” to “What counts as appropriate?”

The subtext is a defense of institutional continuity. By insisting “we have never really had” absolute privacy, Denning folds today’s anxieties about digital surveillance into older investigative powers: wiretaps, subpoenas, pen registers. It’s a rhetorical move that can calm panic, but it also quietly minimizes what changed. Electronic communications don’t just replicate paper; they multiply the volume, permanence, and searchability of a life. “Access” is no longer a detective listening to one line. It can be a system hoovering up metadata at scale, then retroactively interrogating it.

Context matters: Denning is a longtime voice in security and cryptography debates where “going dark” arguments frame strong encryption as a threat to lawful investigation. Her sentence is doing political work: legitimizing state capability by wrapping it in due process language, while inviting the public to treat surveillance as routine, inevitable, even historically polite. The fight, she implies, isn’t over privacy’s existence - it’s over who gets to define its limits.