Hardcopy Quotes

“We got it on file,” Van Dyne said.

Vince could not believe what he had heard. “I thought people in your line of work didn't keep records? Safer for you and essential for your clients.”

Van Dyne shrugged. “Fuck the clients. Maybe one day the feds or the locals hit us, put us out of business. Maybe I find myself needing a steady flow of cash for lawyers' fees. What better than to have a list of a couple of thousand bozos living under phony names, bozos who'd be willing to be squeezed a little rather than have to start all over again with new lives.”

“Blackmail,” Vince said.

“An ugly word,” Van Dyne said. “But apt, I'm afraid. Anyway, all we care about is that we are safe, that there aren't any records here to incriminate us. We don't keep the data in this dump. Soon as we provide someone with a new ID, we transmit the record of it over a safe phone line from the computer here to a computer we keep elsewhere. The way that computer is programmed, the data can't be pulled out of it from here; it's a one-way road; so if we are busted, the police hackers can't reach our records from these machines. Hell, they won't even know the records exist.”

This new high-tech criminal world made Vince woozy. Even the don, a man of infinite criminal cleverness, had thought these people kept no records and had not realized how computers had made it safe to do so”
― Dean Koontz, Watchers

“Memang sudah ada sekarang internet, media elektronik, yang jauh lebih cepat dan instan, sebagaimana disinggung pembicara lain tadi, tetapi buku sendiri, meski cara produksinya lambat, jelas tidak pernah akan lenyap.”
― Mangunwijaya Yusuf B.