Interview with Peter Thiel

The debate about security and civil liberties, he says, is often framed as involving a trade-off between the two things. ‘My view is that it’s quite the opposite. As a libertarian, I believe that it’s critical to develop technology like this, because the alternative is that you will get very low-tech solutions that are enormously intrusive but have very little value, which is basically what happened after 9/11 in the United States. For example, if you have no way of potentially identifying likely terrorists you may require every single person to take their shoes off every time they get on an airplane. And I think this is the way one needs to think of the entire, somewhat dysfunctional, National Security Agency/industrial complex. It’s more the Keystone Cops than Big Brother.