The U.K. Parliament is close to passing the Online Safety Bill, which threatens global privacy by allowing backdoors into messaging services, compromising end-to-end encryption. Despite objections, no amendments were accepted. The bill also includes content filtering and surveillance measures. There’s still a chance for lawmakers to protect privacy with an amendment preserving encryption. A recent survey shows the majority of U.K. citizens want strong privacy on messaging apps.
This quote has been popular since long before tech-libertarians were a thing.
Of course, otherwise we wouldn’t still be using it.
But in the context of internet privacy, specifically, my guess is it was initially popularized by tech-libertarians or those who hung around on the conspiracy theory areas of the internet (Venn diagram overlaps a bit there, though not entirely).
There’s no doubt it was used as a quote for privacy in general before that.
I should hold back on my assumptions, though, so thanks for reminding me of that. Could obviously be very wrong.