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Civil Liberties And The New Reality
Politically, America is an intensely polarized country, where discussion of issues quickly tends to bog down in notions of what is "left" or "right," thus ideologically pure, and consideration of a wide range of issues, from gun control and abortion to privacy and surveillance -- quickly freeze people into opposing camps characterized by rigidity, hostility and absence of communication. On the Net, people with particular interests increasingly often talk only to one another and consider only their own particular values and beliefs.
In fairness, let me declare my own warped perspective at the moment. I live just west of New York City, felt much affected by a visit to the attack site, and live in a town which has apparently lost somewhere between 30 and 40 people. Elsewhere in the country, life is beginning to move on, as it should, but in greater New York, it's still all death, all the time, on TV and in other media. As bits of bodies get pulled out of the wreckage, people give up hope of finding people from the wreckage, people give up hope of finding the people they love, and disruptions continue as the funerals and memorial services increase. People here remain numb and heavy-hearted.
It's easy to be suspicious of Attorney General John Ashcroft and of the FBI he heads when they say they need broader powers to wiretap, monitor the Net and conduct surveillance of Americans. Many people worry that once these powers are granted, they will never be given back. And some of these people don't have a comforting record of sensitivity when it comes to protecting privacy, free speech and individual civil liberties. But the terrorist attack has changed the entire context of these discussions, putting the issues far beyond knee-jerk reflexes.
But there is also something reflexively knee-jerk in the automatic "they-are-taking-our-freedoms-away" response from certain quarters online. The Justice Department isn't proposing dropping all restrictions or warrants or oversight regarding wiretapping and surveillance. They propose to ease some of them. This may or may not be a good idea. But it needs -- deserves -- to be rationally and openly considered.
First- and second-generation Internet dwellers value their freedoms, and have often had to defend them. Our government, sponsors of the CDA, Carnivore, and the DMCA -- it doesn't have a noble history here. Few people in government have ever made privacy and freedom online a political priority.
But the cataclysm at the World Trade Center is a historic event, and many people do, in fact, need to "get it." We will be living, thinking and behaving differently. Many of us -- if we and our families want to live safely -- will have to redefine our traditional politics, and consider new ways of defining certain rights.
The night of the attacks, reporters asked a New York City fire official why the city put out a desperate call for gas masks and vaccines that morning. "We thought one of the hijackers might possibly be carrying Anthrax -- there were some intelligence reports about that." The official stopped. "If they had been," he told reporters, "there might be 100,000 dead people, maybe more."
My own record of yowling about privacy and the First Amendment ad nauseum is clear enough, so I feel entitled to consider some other points of view, especially this week.
Certain rights -- equality, liberty -- are considered inviolate. But almost all rights are subject to a series of checks and balances, always subject to circumstance, never absolutes granted without reservation, in perpetuity, regardless of external circumstance. Yes, people online have the right to keep their communications private and people have the right -- I believe -- to move online and travel in the real world without their movements being monitored and recorded by governmental authorities. But people have the right to go to work without buildings falling on them, too.
This is how the WTC attacks have challenged our system of rights. The thousands of dead and millions of others who work in vulnerable office towers, or travel or study or live near airports (or schools, or ports, or national symbols) have rights too, and they have been grievously violated.
The government has an obligation to protect them.
These terrorists are technologically skilled, government authorities say. They use the Net to e-mail one another, and to send encrypted files, sometimes online, at other times via Zip disks or other media. They move money online, make plans there, thus avoiding possible interception by traditional intelligence monitors listening to phone and cell calls. Is it really totally unreasonable for authorities to seek broader powers to follow these conversations? Wiretap laws are not adequate for teaching these kinds of criminals. Existing wiretap laws require warrants for each telephone, even though criminals and terrorists might use dozens of phones or a variety of communications systems.
If terrorists are proven to be using encrypted files, aren't government agents entitled -- even obligated, on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims and many more future victims -- to get warrants to intercept them? Would we really rather that our water systems be poisoned, or our cities choked with gas, or planes flown into schools and City Halls? This would have seemed silly hyperbole to me a month ago, but all of these things are now plausible in the post-World Trade Center world.
Many of us have already happily and willingly surrendered some privacy to Napster, Amazon, gaming sites, EZ-Pass toll systems, online retailers and other Web tracking services which have lists of our shopping, reading, entertainment habits and preferences. Corporations have abolished many conventional notions of privacy, while most Americans shrug it off as a new convenience. Is it really our position that Wal-Mart can own the details of our lives, but that government agents tracking those people who murdered 5,000 of our fellow citizens can't?
Nobody in his right mind would support a blank check for government authorities. Any new laws to fight this new kind of war ought to be temporary, and self-expiring, perhaps subject to annual review. There ought to be clear civil and criminal penalties for wanton violations of privacy and excessive monitoring.
But when something like the World Trade Center attacks occur, the challenge, it seems to me, isn't to retreat into our knee-jerk positions, but to pause and carefully consider the new reality. Any government's primary obligation is to protect and defend its citizens. The failure to do that last week occurred primarily, many terrorism experts say, because our existing intelligence institutions don't have the human resources, the technology or the laws to keep up with a sophisticated, well-funded, technologically-savvy network of murderous enemies. We might want to ponder what rights we owe the living and owed the dead -- the right to live, to be and have parents, to work or fly without being torn to bits or crushed in a collapsing inferno.
I swear that sumbitch has been reading my mind these past few days.
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If we allow our rights to become significantly abridged, then we have let the terrorists win. I do not claim to have the answers, but we are treading on a slipperly slope that could lead to the loss of more than just a little privacy.
Certainly, we would all be physically safer if we lived in a totalitarian regime with no privacy protection. Would that be worth the cost? No, Katz does not advocate this, but the very subject of the erosion of our civil liberties is a dangerous one. Yes, we need a national debate on this. Hopefully cool heads will prevail.
The State will always use a crisis to increase its power, size, interference, control. This is old hat.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Every measure restricting freedom taken to ferret out mid-eastern terrorist will create MIDDLE AMERICAN terrorists. Don't be a fool. It would be easier for an American to get a weapon of mass destruction or hijack a plane over American airspace than a foreigner.
The question then becomes, where is the balance. What amount of freedom are you willing to give up to feel safe?
This was true in the Civil War, certainly. It was also true in World War I and World War II.
I have no objections to temporary measures designed to prosecute this war against medieval extremism.
What I fear, and I think what most people fear, is "mission creep." The "temporary changes" made during the war would become permanent.
We saw that in the aftermath of WWII. No one objected to the measures of that time (although there was, later, guilt over what happened to Japanese-Americans). But the attitudes of us vs. them, of absolute war, were carried over for political reasons into the horror we now call McCarthyism.
Any suspension of any of our rights, then, must be a war-time measure, part of the government's war-time efforts, aimed solely at prosecuting this war the President has declared. (Personally I'd like a Congresssionally-approved declaration, but they're having difficult defining the enemy.)
I have no objections to measures enacted with the aim of winning this war. I do object, strongly, and will lay down my life, against their being made permanent.
The primary rationale I see bandied about is that during wartime every populace has to give up certain rights or to allow the governement the ability to infringe on those rights if need be. Be it the ability to free movement during World War II (what with gas rationing and etc) or freedom of the press (to not relay possibly sensitive information). But most of the civil liberties that have been infringed upon in the past have seemed to be ones that are very apparent.
The problem I have with the current batch of liberties to be thrown away is that they aren't that apparent. Sure wiretapping laws are making news right now, but 4 or 5 years from now they won't be slapping you in the face in the same manner that gas rationing would. (Does that make sense?)
Past liberties given up have been so apparent that as soon as the crisis/rationale was over, people would've clamored for those rights back. However with wiretapping/backdoor encryption/etc the process is so transparent that I can't see enough people even realizing that they're still in place to create enough of an outcry to get them back. (whew... thank god for runon sentences)
But all that being said, if that's what it actually takes then I'm for it. If it's just the FBI using the current crisis as a free ticket to push the same agenda that they've been pushing for the past few years... well...
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
These new rules WILL NOT prevent future disasters. These rules will not only be used to spied on suspected terrorists (read every group that disagrees with our government or those in power.) We need to get out from under this rock that GW has put our country. We need to participate in the world, we need to cooperate with foriegn countries and work together to stop this stuff. We need to stop pretending that the USA is the end all and be all of the world and that we can go it alone. I will not give upmy freedoms because some a-holes decide they are going to blow stuff up.
How far behind are ID cards and strip searches to get in the mall. Screw that, I say we actually enforce the laws we already have and cooperate with other countries. That is the best way, not trampling the rights of everyone.
Friendly
They would rather restrict certain rights (because they aren't terrorists, so they have nothing to fear).
What's wrong with this idea is that in countries where there are armed guards in airports, malls, etc., the people do not consider that to be infringing on their rights, or to be evidence of a police state.
Most of the people I've talked with would definately give up their liberties (privacy, etc.) for a sense of security (not having armed guards). I guess WE, collectively, deserve neither.
P.S. One woman in my PhD program is a former judge, she was one of the people I've spoken with who see this propblem, so, hopefully, the cheques and balances may actually prevent this.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
But it's important that we think about each liberty, each law that goes through Congress, instead of writing a blank check for the gov't to cash. Some things make sense; wiretap procedure could be cleaned up slightly. On the other hand, there are issues like the potential ban on strong (un-backdoored) crypto. How does a single country banning this tech hurt the terrorists, and is it anything more than a knee-jerk reaction?
I'm not worried about compromising on a few areas, especially when they make sense. I am concerned that we're going to give the green light to every sort of incursion on our freedoms, even if it does little to stop terrorism.
You'd think that the CIA could track the enemies that it created itself, such as bin Laden.
I can't believe that people are beating the drum to increase funding for the CIA, or to cut the CIA loose. Heh, they set bin Laden up to start with, and encouraged Islamic fundamentalism in the anti-Soviet cause. Now he's Blowback. And what about that fundamentalist terrorist group, the KLA, that we've funded and supported? And we want the CIA to get _more_? To do _more_? Of what? The same old thing? No, thanks. No people who truly love liberty would tolerate such a vile organization like the CIA on its own shores.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Do you actually know anything about the Muslims than what you see in the media when they're talking about terrorist attacks?
The Muslim religion does NOT breed violence and hate... that seems to have more to do with the geography and history of that religion. My roommate of 4 years in college was a Muslim, and he's told me a good deal about his religion. It doesn't preach hate or violence. That's a human trait. Hell, look at the things the Catholic church has done.
Don't group all Muslims together. They're as varied as any other group.
I'm not sure I'm ready to tell those kids whose parents didn't come home last week that they and others down the road just have to suck it up because people may be unwilling -- even temporarily -- to lose any measure of privacy.
I'm totally with you here. Absolutely.
If terrorists are proven to be using encrypted files, aren't government agents entitled -- even obligated, on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims and many more future victims -- to get warrants to intercept them?
Yup. And you used the magic words: "to get warrants." This warrantless-wiretap stuff is scary. It would be one thing if it were windowed (a sunset date, say, 90 days from now), which I think we could tolerate for the purpose of the immediate crisis. But to forever and ever have wiretaps without a court order? That's no good.
But here's the part about your statement that makes me uncomfortable. I assume that by "intercepting" "encrypted files," what you mean is not merely for federal officials to possess the encrypted data, but to be able to decrypt that data. And I can't say that I agree with that. Firstly because of the technical problems: any encryption with a backdoor is much, much easier to crack. (IANAC [I Am Not A Cypherpunk], but this is what I gather to be the case.) Secondly because what that really is, is a law against secrets. "There can be no secrets." And a law against encryption is as worthless as a missle defense shield. If people want to tell secrets, they'll meet in person in a dark alley. But to fatally weaken electronic secrecy for this purpose, I think, is going too far.
I'm willing to give up a lot of privacy on a temporary basis (and some on a long-term basis) to prevent this from happening again. But to permanently surrender electronic secrecy? I think that's asking too much.
JM2C,
Waldo
"WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 ? The Justice Department has drafted legislation allowing the U.S. attorney general to lock up foreigners deemed to be terrorist suspects and order them deported without presenting any evidence."
http://msnbc.com/news/631008.asp
That makes me just a tad uneasy.
http://pebkac.net
That is a fallacy Jon, or at least a distortion. The implication is that people have a right to be protected from bad things by society, and I strongly disagree.
If the government were dropping buildings on people, then clearly that would be as criminal as if a terrorist were to do it, and I would expect some consequences. But in much the same sense, I do not have a right to be free from disease. I do not have a right to be ensured that my car will not be stolen. I do not have a right to not be robbed by a criminal.
Think of it this way: a particular sort of crime -- that is, an act defined societally as a crime -- does not imply that potential victims have a right not to be victimized. Society condemns and punishes perpetrators of crimes, and on popular agreement puts in place systems and mechanisms to make perpetration of crime more difficul. None of that implies that citizens have unlimited rights to safety.
As Jon knows, but ignores, the difference is, we willingly give our details to Wal-Mart, or they illegally bought them after we opted-out. The government should be in the same position: they can ask me to give up my details, or they can buy them from someone violating my having opted out, same as anyone else.
The government is not a knight in shining armor, and they don't deserve any extra priveliges over me.
Don't tread on me.
Politically, America is an intensely polarized country, where discussion of issues quickly tends to bog down in notions of what is "left" or "right," thus ideologically pure
/. However, it's important that we might have to let go of certain rights, even permanently to preserve the safety of the nation.
This is most true, as seen on many arguments here on
It's a mixed bag. even though we lose certain rights to privacy especially through wiretapping, hopefully it will only be used when there is probable cause to wiretap. Therefore, most "personal" conversations will likely go unmonitored. Not a total loss of the right to privacy by any means.
The root of this matter is, how much privacy do we forego to reduce the chances of this tragedy occurring again?
Is that it's rare to "temporarily" give up any privacy rights.
I'm not sure I'm ready to tell those kids whose parents didn't come home last week that they and others down the road just have to suck it up because people may be unwilling -- even temporarily -- to lose any measure of privacy.
It just sucks it had to be somthing like this to wake people like JonKatz up. I was surprised (though, not offended) at the level of security in customs when my family would fly back and forth to Europe during my father's assignment in Italy. Since then, I was always amazed at the lack of true security at most US airports. When's the last time you saw a team of dogs searching every suitcase?
Let someone have their suitcase sniff-free and remain zippered to agents, but please don't put him on my plane.
You're confusing steganography (data hiding) with cryptography (data obfuscation).
You're right, though.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
J Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for 48 years, and became the most powerful man in US history (including all the presidents) by spying on it's citizens and using that information.
I think this shows that the dangers are very real and that the government can not be trusted to only use spying powers for good. They'll use it however they please.
Of course, spying technology has advanced immensly since then.
Though these abuses are rare, they are not as rare as a hijacking.
I do admit on a wiretap order a person versus a phone makes sense.
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I will leave the country and not look back. It will stop being the America I believe in.
I guess what I'm really saying is that I do not have the right to go to work without a building falling on me.
To me, rights are inviolate principles of interaction that are firmly based in ideas of what it is and is not possible to do. The constitution doesn't outline a right not to be murdered because that right is not a reasonable consequence of being alive.
I think the rights the constitution outlines are as much to protect the government from doing stupid things in an attempt to achieve the impossible as they are an attempt to protect people from government.
I need to read John Locke, and a few of the other philosophers from around the time the constitution was crafted. I don't think I have the intellectual tools to articulate my argument effectively without their words.
Perhaps it's just that I shall always be a freelance bacterium instead of a cell of a body. But, I think the organism of a state can exist without every little manufacture of a signalling chemical being noted by the brain.
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I think that the key is to ensure that the curbs on freedom are always the minimum necessary.
Take for instance the old example of identity cards, which have always been viewed with suspicion in the UK, where I am from.
What harm would it do to have them I have heard ask? Well of course it depends on what is on them and when you have to carry them.
For instance we already have identity cards whilst flying on commercial flights anyway. They are called passports. I don't think that anyone has any real problems with this. This is follows the idea of the mimimum requirement. On a plane there is an overridingly good reason why ID is required. This is different from saying we should have to carry ID all the time.
What should be on them? We could just have names for instance. Okay that's probably reasonable. But what if they had addresses? Okay you say whats the problem. Well if you live in a region where you are likely to be mugged you probably would not want to carry something with your address on it. What about religion? In the light of recent attacks on Mosques in Manchester where I live, I can see many people who would have great worries about this.
The danger at the moment is that every time some one criticises official policy, suggests that they might be wrong, they get accused of being supportive of terrorism. Its a very dangerous state of affairs. We need criticism more now, and not less. We need to ensure that any curbs on freedoms are necessary, that they are likely to effective in what they are supposed to achieve, and that they are proportionate to the threat.
News that Bush has decided to launch a crusade on a terrorist jihad do not fill me with hope that this will be the case.
Phil
Many people, myself included, have no problem with authorities having powers so long as there is proper oversight (warrents, involvement of judiciary, eventual reporting of activity, etc..). But you -cannot- trust paranoid services like the NSA/MI5/Mossad to do this volanterraly, they always seem to have to have it forced on them (and often appeat to ignore it anyway).
Those who are currently pushing for massive secret surveilance are wrong, those who are pushing for no survelkiance ever.. are also wrong.
A balance must be struck, and one we can trust.
At present I do not trust the branches of government that want to erod my freedom and I'll fight them all the way. By taking an extreme position myself, I help balance the scales a bit.
This is despite the fact that I'd actually accept some erosion of specific liberties if rights were given -back- in some other areas, and accountability and trust became something other than a NSA spin campaign.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
I've yet to hear any good arguments that opening backdoors in cryptography or increased surveillance would do anything to actually help prevent future terrorist attacks. Is there anything that makes you believe the current attack wouldn't have happened if the govt. could snoop on all encrypted communications traffic? It's one of those things that sounds almost obvious, but when I start to think about it further, I wonder if it really would do any good. Wouldn't terrorists just work outside the areas of communication these laws cover? I'm betting the terrorists didn't use encryption this last time. Weren't some of these guys wanted by the feds anyway? Why weren't they just picked up? Cracking encryption isn't likely to help you find someone is it? Just watch for encrypted traffic and set up surveillance on the sources... ?
-beme
1971
Actually as someone else posted, the quote is:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
The thing you need to read there is essential. Then you need to remember that Ben Franklin lived during a period of history where (compared to what we've had) terrorism was the equivalent of an Amish couple throwing old fruit at people from a moving buggy.
You look at the images from New York, think about that fact, then think about how essential it is that no one can read that email between you and your wife.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
The US government is demonstrating an unprecedented amount of unity. Which of course is a very bad thing. The main reason why our government is often unable to screw people over effectively is the automatic opposition across republican/democrat lines. Without that, and with the full support of other important officials, just about anything can become law if it can be called "antiterrorism." Add in the fact that congressmen don't listen to engineers, and even good ideas could result in bad implementations. Our government has the capability right now to make some very big mistakes that could take years to correct, so there is no such thing as overreacting. We must substitute our voices for the usual voices of opposition that have gone silent, so that our nation's delicate emotional state does not give the terrorists yet another victory to celebrate.
These terrorists are technologically skilled, government authorities say. They use the Net to e-mail one another, and to send encrypted files, sometimes online, at other times via Zip disks or other media. They move money online, make plans there, thus avoiding possible interception by traditional intelligence monitors listening to phone and cell calls.
I have yet to see any proof of this; there is no evidence so far that any of the terrorists involved in the WTC disaster relied on anything more technological than a telephone to plan and execute their plans. The idea that the Internet is a terrorist medium seems to be mostly played up by a bored media.
I actually find the idea that someone like Bin Laden (who is probably living in a cave right now) would jump aboard the Internet as the ultimate terrorism organizational tool highly questionable. The concept of encryption is familiar to us on Slashdot, but to most other people it's really voodoo. The Internet is primarly an American invention, it would be prudent for someone to be wary of placing so much faith in the device of his enemy.
Hindsight is 20-20.
You look back, and you can clearly see that the US and other governments were heading this direction.
It's little surprise, then, that they are taking advantage of this opportunity to achieve their goals much, much faster, with far, far less trouble from the masses.
We'll soon have a passively numb population who have no expectation of privacy, no desire to become informed, and no passion for influencing the direction of government.
Baa! Baa! Baa!
Sheep are good. They buy consumer products without questioning their value, quality, or necessity. They pay their taxes without questioning where the money goes. They go to work and meekly accept lousy pay and lousy conditions. They don't challenge the laws. They don't cause trouble.
That's what the corporations want. That's what the governments want. And that's what we're going to get.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If anyone should be allowed to spy on anyone else, then it should be the citizens of the US whom are allowed to spy on their own government in order to keep them in check, not the other way 'round. Allowing a government to spy on its own people is right up there with the KGB and Communism. Didn't we fight that once?
--- What?
I agree with Katz, surprisingly, but I do find that he has some problems with his statement. I don't think there is such a thing as 'post-WTC attack'. We've always lived in a world that has terrorists, it's just that America has been fortunate enough not to have to deal with too much of it (unlike some other countries). I don't think we need to take any liberties away, we only need to re-evaluate what is needed to make the intelligence gathering easier when certain giveaway signals are given.
The "one step beyond" Phenomenon. Why is it difficult to check Drug on Olympics ? Because drug maker are already One step beyond. Why will backdoor on encryption program and other wiretap things be next to useless ? Because forewarned is forarmed and terrorist will either use under the hands encryption without backdoor or use uncrackable method like one time pad, imbed into other file type, whatever.
Then what ? Make encryption illegal ?
But nothing will stop any governement once it has taken the first step on restriction ladder : it will ask for more : Drug dealer are using encryption too, right ? And they do more death pro year. And then it will be another group and so on.
In the evry End the terrorist are using "terror" to paralyse, cripple the population or throw the opposition into incosiderate steps. By just implementing the above , Katz, not only you do not rise the chance of getting terrorist caught on security alone, but you acknowledge their terror and show them that they have WON. Their ACTION pushed YOU into COUNTERREACTION.
After Pearl Harbor, Admmiral Kimmel and General Short were relieved of their commands. They were fired and disgraced. We can expect some fairly high ranking people to be fired, but proving criminal negligence would be tough.
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Last week, living here in D.C., I heard a news commentator use the phrase "Marshall Law" when describing planes overhead and armed troops around the White House. Putting my head in my hand, I mumbled "whatta idiot".
My wife asked why, I explained to her that generally one considers the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to be Marshall Law. Mind you, I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on T.V.
However, it raised the question in my mind last week, are we going to be compelled by current circumstances to forgoe some freedoms in exchange for not loosing them all ? Opinions ?
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
If I don't have the freedom to travel in my own country to a football stadium, then my other freedoms aren't worth a damn. Your freedom has already been curtailed by the terrorists in reality far more than the government ever will in theory.
I think some people need to clue that life is a bit different than a week ago. To be honest, I think that is the root of the problem here... too many people think it's a movie, and it hasn't really sunk in that it really happened, there really are evil people in the world whose only goal is to destroy democracy, and that there come times in history when the world has to stand up to evil.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
To start I would like to point out that Income tax was also a "temporary" measure to cover the costs of the WW's. There is also a thing called precedence, and it is very dangerous.
n ews-wto-c hina
Second there are lots of open and readily available algorithms for encryption, ones that are very difficult to crack and have no back doors, you don't think that they will be able to write their own encrypted communications software?
Have you ever seen an individual who suffers from paranoid delusions. My aunt does, she started off as a fairly normal person, but over 5 years with 9 deaths in the family she slowly slipped down this slope to near insanity. After nearly ripping apart our family with paranoid acusations of attempted poisonings and sewing discord in her immediate family leved at the rest of the extended family and generally distrusting everyone, she saw a psychologist and is now on some meds that have sort of turned her into a zombie.
As well has anyone noticed that China was granted entry into the WTO yesterday. No fanfare at all, you would think that it would make at least a bit of a splash!
http://news.excite.ca/news/ap/010918/05/
slashdot shenanigans
What I am worried about is knee-jerk, feel-good legislation. Passing sweeping legislation right after a tragedy of this magnitude is underhanded and deceitful. It is playing off of the emotions and ignorance of the general populace.
Banning unbackdoored strong crypto will have a devestating effect on world commerce. Except for a short (few months, maybe) period following 9/11/2001 most people will be more concerned with the security of their bank account than with a potential terrorist attack.
The National Counterintelligence Center (http://www.nacic.gov/) is well aware of the legitimate uses of strong crypto: banking, commerce, protecting trade secrets, etc. The U.S. loses billions of dollars a year to industrial espionage -- much of it State sponsored.
The entire world banking system relies on strong crypto.
Terrorists can easily switch to something else -- like code words; written instructions; steganography.
How many BILLIONS of web pages are out there? Does anyone really believe anyone can monitor them all for "suspicious" traffic? Sift through them for hidden messages; code phrases; etc.
Yes, the gov't has to do something. However, that something should be an intelligent, well thought out response, not knee-jerk feel-good legislation that really won't solve the problem.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Our founding father's had to fight for the freedom that we have now. After that war, America began to spread freedom and democracy to other places, we were on the offensive. Now, we must fight to maintain that freedom, we are on the defensive again. I am willing to fight evil to keep our freedom, but I will not just hand my freedom over to our government for protection. We must provide our own protection to keep our freedoms.
Would you accept more
government involvement in
your life if it meant more
security against terrorism?
Last check:
Yes 71% 44,665 votes
No 29% 18,202 votes
Perhaps part of freedom is being able to surrender rights, at best only temporarily.
Of course the question that always hangs in the air is: Who will be the watchers?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It is inversely related.
To some people, owning a gun is a freedom, and to others, having guns removed is a sense of securityl. To the gun owner though, that is a loss of security and freedom.
It insn't inversely related in a perfect sense since everybodies views are different and justifiable by there own means.
Just like the old saying security through obscurity. The the terrorists, this is how they win, through obscure networks of non trackable paths, hence security. To an instutution this is a liability since they can't protect and gurantee service and levels of reliability. To the terrorists any "service" is a win, and a liability is a loss but not to a degree where it impacts bottom line, to corporations service is the revenue and liability is a loss to the bottom line.
no one is right. If we had freedoms to smoke pot then the freedoms to drink may be adversely affected.
I wish we could have freedoms of humanity and work our way up. I'd rather have the freedom to walk around naked at a beach then the freedom to own a gun. I'm not a hunter, murder or soldier. I have no use for a gun, but being myself and being naked is a god given freedom that is illegal. Having a gun is not a god given freedom. Hunting is a part of life, i don't dispute that, as all creatures on this planet hunt in some form or fashion.
I'd rather have the freedoms to eat, drink and divulge in acts of expressions and unity that are illegal. I'd like to be able to go to a field and play drums and have a powow without being arrested for tresspassing, public meetings without license, noise polution and having to worry about municipality rules, laws and regulations.
Going back to guns. I would give up the freedom of a right to own guns for the safety of my children and there right to go to school without fear of guns and without metal detectors and the invasion of privacy for search and seizure of guns. To me the freedoms we loose by another right are just as important in this discussion as anything else..
Again, no one is right.. for you can claim having a gun is safety and protection..
oh well.
Nobody could defend themselves in the 'weapons-free safety zone' created by FAA regulations and US law
Uh huh.
Tell that to the passengers of flight #93.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
government involvement in
your life if it meant more
security against terrorism?
Last check:
Yes 71% 44,665 votes
No 29% 18,202 votes
Perhaps part of freedom is being able to surrender rights, at best only temporarily.
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." --Samuel Adams
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I do hope you're referring to "checks and balances" and not, um, influence peddling...
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Security and freedom are inversely related.
No, this could not be more wrong. Security and convenience are inversely related. Security and freedom are not. This is a very important distinction.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Then you need to remember that Ben Franklin lived during a period of history where (compared to what we've had) terrorism was the equivalent of an Amish couple throwing old fruit at people from a moving buggy.
Tell that to Guy Fawkes. Had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, we might very well be carrying on this discussion in French, if at all. Not that Fawkes was any supporter of the French, but it's hard to picture them NOT capitalizing on the results had he been successful.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
If you want to live at a lower technological level, then you can find places where the people have more rights, at least as far as their government is concerned.
Best Slashdot Co
In some ways you have to agree with Jon (omg I said it). But let me say first off, being that Jon stated he lived just west of New York City (e.g. New Jersey), makes me want even more so to hunt him down. Jon, New Jersey isn't *THAT* big *grin*.
Anyway...
I don't think giving up our civil rights is a good thing. I was just reading the book Secrets & Lies by Bruce Schneier and he said the Supreme Court has said we have the right to privacy. Well, we all have to agree. Just as I have a right to encrypt the love note to my mistress, a terrorist has the right to encrypt a confirmation of attack of some suicidal extremist... despite the *nature* of the contents of the e-mail.
Coming in from the other side of the argument, the problem is that the gov't does NOT have the resources to track every phone conversation and every e-mail sent in the world... or even the U.S. Just the amount of spam transmitted at any given second on the Internet would keep the CIA up for days filtering through it. The likelihood that our individual rights would be violated is highly doubtful just from the sheer magnitude of information.
Honestly, I personally feel we cannot come up with a definitive end to this arguement. Arguements can be made from both sides.. both being valid. Any person that can not see the validity of arguements from both sides is just plain ignorant. (Many posts I have seen so far go against Jon, and prove ignorant). Maybe it's time for investigators to find new ways of gathering vital information... maybe the old ways need to be modified to work with modern public-key encryption... who knows....
It's easy to be suspicious of Attorney General John Ashcroft and of the FBI he heads
Yes, it is easy to be suspicious of Ashcroft, but he doesn't head the FBI. That is someone else.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
I think the first thing that needs to be asked about all these proposed new laws is, "Would they have done anything to stop the WTC incident had they been in effect before it?". For example, would the new wiretap powers have done anything given that the government doesn't seem to know that communication between the terrorists was going on at all? If US-made crypto tech has back doors or key escrow or other access mechanisms installed, do you think the terrorists will give up what they already have and switch to it? And if they don't, will those access mechanisms help one bit? Will additional restrictions on checked luggage and manifest checks stop someone who walks past a bored security guard carrying a knife in his pocket and boards the plane?
This is my heartburn with a lot of what's being proposed. Not that it may restrict our rights, but that it will restrict our rights without doing anything about the problem being used to justify it.
Thank-you for the exact quote.
It takes on a interesting shade of meaning when fully and correctly quoted doesn't it? Consider the word essential.
What is an essential liberty? Is freedom of movement? Yes. Is boarding an airplane essential? No. Is the freedom to associate? Yes. Is using electronic communications? No.
The difficulty is when you attempt to live in world full of artifical dichotomies. "It's this way or that way." The world is fully of shades of gray, but many people insist on black and white.
Dropping the word "essential" from Benjamin Franklin's quote is a convenient way to force the discussion into black and white terms.
All of the changes being suggested and argued about have one thing in common--they provide a cheap alternative to actually solving the problem.
It would be possible to solve the problem of security in our skies without taking away any of our liberties. Make sure there are (frequently) law enforcement officers on board flights. Yes, this is being considered, but it is expensive. It's cheaper to build a database and track each person flying. It is an invasion of privacy, but it is cheaper.
It would be possible to solve the problem of Middle Eastern terrorism, but it is expensive. It would require assistance to the desperately poor parts of the region, to build schools, hospitals, and the other things they need to support a decent life. It would require us to be willing to pay a higher price to get oil that is not purchased from tyrants. It would require us to give up our notion of "client states" and recognize that the people who are considered too poor and powerless to worry about today will be desperate enough to follow a madman tomorrow. But it's cheaper to try and spy and assassinate our way out of the problem. It won't work, of course, and will create bigger problems down the line, but it is cheaper than solving the problem.
The world didn't change last week, really. Many innocent people lost their lives in a senseless tragedy. The tragedy will be compounded if we don't start educating ourselves about the world we live in, and if we don't realize that there is no person on this planet too poor, too different, or too desperate to be important.
There's no automatic relationship between freedom and security. Many times in American history, when we have suppressed freedom in wartime we have gained no additional security at all. For example, the interning of Japanese Americans didn't increase our security. Banning the teaching of German during World War I didn't increase our security. Hoover's FBI blackmailing didn't increase our security.
It is a serious error to assume that because sometimes increased security reduces freedom, anything that reduces freedom increases security. Things don't work that way.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
There is no new information here, nor has the nature of the enemy in fact changed.
The only thing I can see that's new is that this thing has made it more difficult for people in the US, and maybe some other places, to maintain their illusion of safety. Is a change in illusions now considered enough to be a "new reality"?
In fact, I'd argue that one reason some of the things that are proposed are counterproductive is that all people really want is something that restores precisely the illusion of safety. Reality is less important; as long as, by avoiding thinking too hard about it, they can convince themselves that something helps, that's good enough. People don't want to look too hard at what they're suggesting, because they may find something wrong with it... and they're afraid they may not come up with any better idea.
I'm not sure I give a damn about privacy any more myself, but that's not related to this incident.
Byond modisty and religion, planes are too cold to go without clothing.
Of course as I've been telling people, banning knives isn't the answer, the next terrorist who trys something like this will know karate. I'll take on a terrorist in an airplace if he has a knife, gun, or karate as a weapon, so long as I have a gun, but I won't take on a black belt with anything less. (Assuming I'm a passanger the terrorist won't know I'm dangerious until after I've killed a few of them, and I'll act like an unarmed passanger until I can kill at least one, from a distance)
This was a well planned attack. they took the time to learn to fly in real planes, they have no problem next time learning martial arts if that is what it will take.
The polarization of the political system is an illusion created by media representations of our system. Does the press write stories about how "middle of the road" some politician's stance is? No. We hear constant discussion of extreme right wing people wanting to axe wellfare, and give guns to every man woman and child. We hear discussion of extreme left wing people wanting to turn us into a giant socialist state. While all these are true in a certain context they are false in a broader one (and certainly meaningless in others but I digress).
When you talk to real people in the world you get a much better sense that we aren't so polarized. We all care about our personal liberties, we all care about safety, we call care about having a good government. Sometimes we may disagree on what those things mean, but overall I think most people aren't as polarized as we've been lead to believe.
We are constantly seeing opinion polls about people's stances on issues, and the very nature of these polls leads to an apparent polarization. Polls, in order to be statisically useful, must limit the possible answers to a question, such as, "are you for or against a woman's right to choose?"
This is yes or now, 1 or 0, left or right. Really, most people have much more subtle opinions. Where's the room in this question for somebody who believes that women need to have a right to choose, but only because there exist no adequate alternatives (fully subsidized day care, college education, etc). That perhaps given a better alternative, the right to have an abortion would be rendered somewhat irrelevant.
The problem isn't that we are a polar society, but rather we choose to frame our perceptions in terms of binary questions. Why? because it's easier that way. I think if we got beyond trying to measure things statistically using simplistic questions we'd rediscover the fact this this nation isn't as polarized as some would like us to believe.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This is not the case. There are many ways in which the security of this country can be improved without infringing upon our liberties. To take just one example, we have all heard many times in the past week about the lax security in airports. Security could be significantly improved if existing security procedures were implemented the way they were supposed to be.
"Many of us have already happily and willingly surrendered some privacy to Napster, Amazon, gaming sites, EZ-Pass toll systems, online retailers and other Web tracking services which have lists of our shopping, reading, entertainment habits and preferences." A strawman. For the most part, these involve people voluntarily giving up privacy. If you prefer not to give up that privacy, you don't have to do business with Napster, Amazon, etc. The thing that makes a world of difference is that some of the proposed measures invade citizen's privacy without the consent of those people. Likewise, when a corporation violates a customer's privacy without the customer's permission, slashdotters (rightfully!) complain loud and long.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
So you say. I say that we hold certain rights to be self-evident and unalienable, creator-granted. While you can pretend to take these rights away from me, you can't actually do that. Even if a majority believes in violating those rights, the rights themselves do not change. They are inviolate. What you are in effect doing is demanding to violate these rights.
You can make yourself feel better by saying that it was necessary. You can come up with catch-phrases, nightly news encouragement, pop culture peer pressure, even the words of elected officials, and you can make yourself feel better. But understand this: it does not diminish these rights, not one bit.
Is it really our position that Wal-Mart can own the details of our lives, but that government agents tracking those people who murdered 5,000 of our fellow citizens can't?
Unless I give my consent, that is exactly my position. As far as I can see, and I have been paying attention, nobody has ASKED for my consent yet.
We might want to ponder what rights we owe the living and owed the dead -- the right to live, to be and have parents, to work or fly without being torn to bits or crushed in a collapsing inferno.
If our rights are collapsed, it will be a bigger collapse than if all the towers in every city were downed.
And when you think about such matters, think about this. Every patriotic song, every homily memorized by school children, every wartime slogan in US history basically says the same thing: we fight to protect the rights that we enjoy.
If we end up protecting the country the "easy" way - the way that doesn't work, if you take a look at what other countries have experienced terrorism - we will be defending it from a principle that no longer exists. When we sing "the land of the free" as the second-to-last phrase in the song that defines our patriotism, we will be hypocrites.
What rights do we owe the living and the dead? The very rights the country was founded upon, of course. If you believe that you are "safe" in a country that ignores not only its founding principles and the words of the document that describes exactly what the country is, what it can do and what it can't, you aren't paying attention.
6000 dead? Danger of 100,000 dead? It's a drop in the bucket -- and please, I am NOT being heartless here -- compared to the numbers of people killed by their own governments during the last century. We're talking into the hundreds of millions.
And if you want defended, let me tell you this. I personally am VERY willing to die to defend FREEDOM and LIBERTY. I would do anything to defend those principles. I am, however, completely UNWILLING to die to defend "the American way of life" where freedom and liberty are so easily given up as a part of that life.
Republicans are least likely to curtain free speech. At the same time they are more likely to broaden the powers of the police and special services (FBI, CIA and the like).
The key here is not that they have more powers to obtain information, but what is done with that information, especially if it does not further the investigation. I have no problem expanding the wire tap laws to allow these groups more leeway, but I want them balanced by the requirement of utmost sensitivity of what is collected, and the requirement of destruction of said documents within 30 days if their value is shown to be non existant. (for non-Americans I think this rule could be extended to 90 days or ignored).
The terrorist won't win if we allow more investigative powers, the system will win. Criminals are gradually reducing the ability of our Police and government from protecting us. Did you see the case in Washingston state where they ruled the local police could not use taps and undercover investigators because it wasn't "honest". What kind of crap is that? I'll tell you, when you put don't allow these people a chance to protect you they will not be able to.
Its a small price for freedom, just as 5500+ we lost on 9/11 was a small price. Freedom costs lives, unfortunately most of this generation never understood that. They do now.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Okay, so you give expanded wiretapping power to the government, so they can tap ALL the phones of a suspected terrorist with one warrant.
/.er: Get a fucking clue.
So he uses SpeakFreely, an encrypted telephone program that runs on a PC with a 14.4 modem or faster.
All right, you pass a law requiring him to give his keys to the government. He refuses to do so, and he's arrested for violation of the new "Big Brother Protects Americans Against Evil Encryption Act". He's sentenced to ten years under the BBPAAEEA.
As he's being led into the jail, another terrorist, this one acting alone and having planned everything outside the USA, detonates a car bomb right outside the first suspected terrorist's cell.
Any expanded power on the government's part will give the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. only a temporary advantage at best. Terrorists have spent their entire lives adapting and reacting to government actions-- why should this be any different?
And putting an "annual review" clause into any proposed legislation is bullshit. It will be miraculously amended out. If not, we'll get speeches every year about how there haven't been any planes flown into the WTC since the law was passed-- and it will be renewed by near unanimous votes. Maybe a senator will, in his infinite wisdom, pass more legislation that amends the expanded wiretap legislation to waive the annual review requirement.
What's it going to take to get the point across that violating civil liberties simply DOESN'T solve the problem? Do we have to institute a police state, and watch as the Empire State Building is bombed before we realize that freedom doesn't cause terrorism?
Come on, Jon. At the risk of sounding like the typical
These terrorists were willing to die for their beliefs. Are we willing to die for ours? If safety is the sacrifice we make for the rights we hold dear, then that's effectively the choice we are making. It isn't to say that we shouldn't do something, but maybe we need to draw the line and say, that we'd rather be blown into oblivion than to lose those liberties and rights we cherish.
Personally I feel that we need to draw that line, to be willing to take that risk. Granted I say this from a perspective of not having lost anybody close to the attacks, so I might not sing the same tune if I was there. But I don't know, what do others think?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
From a civil liberties point of view, I have few problems with investigation (aimed at specific people, with probable cause and court approval). I have a lot of problems with surveillance (aimed at large groups, without oversight). The reason surveillance is scary is that now it's cheap. The constant monitoring on display in "1984" is becoming feasible, thanks to automation.
Previous suspensions of civil liberties eventually went away because they were too expensive to keep up after the threat was over. The new ones being proposed won't have that drawback - if we give up oversight this time, we'll never get it back.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Security is nothing but a sense. Like i said, there are no abosolutes.
Say we buld a forcefield and everyone within that forcefield has all the securities, rights and liberties they feel they need and they feel protected by that forcefield. What happens when someone inside that forcefield does something and now everyone has lost that "Sense" of security?
Security is never absolute, neither are freedoms. That is my only point. For sense is everything. Sight, Sounds, Smell and Taste are our only "Senses" to describe, envision and live within this planet.
Not surprisingly, this issue is not simply a choice between A and B. Most of the replies disagreeing with Katz seem to be from people who lean way toward one side of things and view the slightest move in the opposite direction as all hell breaking loose. We can't just treat this issue the same as the Python advocates trying their darndest to put down Perl users. I've never understood that kind of unflinching devotion to one idea at all costs. We're not playing the same goofy game as usual here, the one where people scream that their civil liberties have been taken away because they can't afford to buy a new CD and want to justify ripping it instead. This is real. Being a miltitant and out-of-context radical is not a worthy alternative to a huge future terrorist act that kills half the population of LA. This cannot be viewed in such a simpleminded manner as "If we crack down on security then the terrorists win."
Well, to start with we Americans have a greater notion of what can be private than many other countries. Certainly, we give up a certain amount of privacy already to facilitate safety during our freedom of movement. Even before this tragedy, in order to fly safely we had already subjected ourselves to a level of intrusion that we tolerated in no other mode of transportation.
Our protections against unreasonable searches and seizures is an area of the law that the Supreme Court has been actively involved in for at least the past four decades. The Supreme Court defines the minimum level of rights that must be observed. Government is not allowed to respect less, although it may respect more. The goverment is currently being pressured by events to grant only the minimum it must to its citizens.
A packet does not, by being a packet define an appropriate level of privacy rights. A packet destined for a public IRC channel should probably not have any more privacy before arriving at the server than after being distributed by the server. The sender's reasonable expectation of privacy upon transmission is zero. However, it is generally illegal for anyone other than the recipient to read unencrypted email. Therefore, there is a reasonable expecation of some privacy.
The reasonable expectation of privacy in electronic media, is then defined by social norms regarding the application that generates or receives the packet, but not anything much else about the packet itself.
One would think that the use of strong encryption would lead to a reasonable expectation of privacy. Which is to say that when someone reads the packet and sees that it contains encrypted data, while the headers might or might not be deemed private, encryption sends a signal about privacy apart from whether or not it really is effective.
In the end, privacy (as defined socially rather than technologically) requires establishing a public norm that can be understood by legislators, law enforcement, prosecutors, and, in the end, judges. Political and social isolation is a recipe for losing privacy in an evolving electronic world.
One of the great misconceptions about life in a police state is that it is somehow "safer". Was Nazi Germany safe to live in? You could be arrested and killed just for angering the wrong person. Was Stalinist Russia safe? You could be sent to a concentration camp just for being the first person to stop clapping.
When we give up our rights, we're far less safe, because all we're doing is legalizing violence.
We need to all remember this cornerstone of liberty: Freedom is our strength.
Miko O'Sullivan
millions more are in danger of losing certain rights because of the new wiretapping and surveillance authority the Justice Department is seeking.
That is correct. The way Americans have been talking, they are ready to sign away the constitution. "Sure, search my email, scan my phone calls, whatever it takes" has been the rally cry of the people. The government doesn't have to try too hard to justify the removal of privileges. Don't you ready your own message board? In a different article (search is down), a representative in congress said "Once your rights are taken away, they are rarely given back. No one in Congress wants to seem soft on terrorism or soft on Crime." We are talking about amending surveillance rules, and they may never be amended back.
Many people worry that once these powers are granted, they will never be given back.
Yep. See the above. Laws made in the heat of passion stay on the books. Law makers won't change the law for the appearance it makes. Try reading the article that was posted by CmdrTaco about the subject of liberties and the rush to have them taken away.
These terrorists are technologically skilled, government authorities say. They use the Net to e-mail one another, and to send encrypted files, sometimes online, at other times via Zip disks or other media. They move money online, make plans there, thus avoiding possible interception by traditional intelligence monitors listening to phone and cell calls. Is it really totally unreasonable for authorities to seek broader powers to follow these conversations?
The short answer is Yes, it is unreasonable. "Here is a good idea. Let's ban crypto. And screen cell calls. And read all email. And Faxes. What? You are against this? You must have something to hide!" I can see it now. Besides, if you implement the above, the bad guy can always use another system. The Bad guy will figure out a way to communication. Meanwhile, the good guy (you too Jon) will have all our private communications analyzed and recorded. (sarcasm) Sounds like a peachy system to me! (/sarcasm)
Many of us have already happily and willingly surrendered some privacy to Napster, Amazon, gaming sites, EZ-Pass toll systems, online retailers and other Web tracking services which have lists of our shopping, reading, entertainment habits and preferences.
Damn, looks like you don't read slashdot after all. Most of us are FAR from happy about giving up our rights. Most of us hate to register (which is why every time there is a reg. required link in a slashdot story, someone always posts a way to get around it). You are really out of touch Jon if you think the people are happy about our losses of privacy and the sharing and selling of personal information.
. Any new laws to fight this new kind of war ought to be temporary, and self-expiring, perhaps subject to annual review.
HAHAHAHAHAHAH. Yea right! Even if they were self-expiring or needed to be reviewed, no one would ever dare vote against a proposal that "fights crime." They wouldn't have a job any more. Even if the law did go away, you are still talking about a couple of years of impeding MY and YOUR freedoms. I don't remember a suspension clause in the Constitution........
I will NOT support any measure to take away MY freedoms, even for a little while. If the CIA (or whomever) wants more power to spy over seas, I can support that. I will NOT support any measure that increases the government's ability to spy on Americans like myself. ABSOLUTLY NOT!!!
Sounds like pretty good words to remember at a time like this. What price are you willing to pay for freedom. I will protect the security of the United States, but I will NEVER agree to ANY SUSPENSION of FREEEDOM!
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
I'll play Devil's Advocate among this largely Libertarian crowd. Why is privacy important to us?
If we are not ashamed of our actions, why do we care if anyone observes them?
If we are ashamed of our actions, shouldn't we change our behavior? (Either don't do it or don't be ashamed of it.)
Don't you think this world would be a better, safer place if everyone behaved as if they were being watched?
Zen
The terrorists apparently (according to media reports) used the NYC public library and Hotmail to communicate. Neither place stores such messages in any way beyond what the users keep. And there's no indication that they used encryption for these communications - they just used public access and free accounts to fly "below radar". You can also encode messages into the content - as a series of text messages or encode it inside images or MP3 tracks - rather than simply encrypting text.
Going lo-tech like this (and using phone cards like the OKC bombers did) drives law enforcement crazy trying to recreate/retrace steps. If the terrorists are as tech savvy and wiley as the Justice department paints them to be then they'll just shift tactics giving them the same protections they have now - but stripping Americans of their personal privacy protections..
I fully support the right of (and agree with the needs of) law enforcement to protect us and pursue people who break the law - but I don't trust law enforcement to "police" themselves when given wide berth to perform their duties.
While I sympathize with the idea of feeling a deep personal loss that is the wrong time to enact laws, strike back blindly or make rash decisions. (I admit that other than finding out that one of the terrorists lived about a block and a half from my house my personal involvement in the tragedy is relatively limited.) The law is suppossed to be the fair handed and impartial enactor of what society views as necessary - that's why the state can execute someone but you can't - even if you're the aggrieved party.
Anyway - I didn't mean to go on like that... this is my first post since last Tuesday - suddenly my karma points seemed unimportant... The bottom line is - remedies NEED to address REAL problems and provide REAL solutions to those problems not just band-aid fixes that hurt in the long run and don't help - even in the short term. I don't trust our (largely) tech-ignorant Congress to pass good laws on difficult issues on such short notice when they have (mostly) law enforcement as advisors and consultants.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
I agree, with some exception. Yes, we do need to reconsider. Such consideration doesn't include warrantless wiretaps against script kiddies. If there is imminent risk to life or property, I'd be willing to concede. To grant broad, non-expiring rights to tap first and ask questions later, you're damned right I'm going to fight it.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Katz used to refer to every event as "post-Columbine."
Now he will refer to everything as "post-WTC."
Spot this phrase and win $10!
:)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Worry #0, I actually agreed with JonKatz...
/. about steganography. Just sitting here for 5 minutes I've come up with at least 4 ways to exchange encrypted and non-encrypted information in ways that don't involve sending obviously encrypted information via email. They don't involve email at all. I'm not going to out line them because I'm suddenly very paranoid about who may by reading this...
Worry #1, we are making the assumption that we CAN identify encrypted communications. We've seen a number of posts on
Worry #2, "it starts when you're always afraid, step outta line, the man come and take you away, we better stop..." Will the simple act of sending and encrypted email make you a suspected terrorist?
Stonewolf
Quotation from "For What It's Worth" By Stephen Stills
JonKatz is absolutely correct -- it is imperative that we look far beyond knee-jerk reflexes, which it is only natural to have in a situation like this. We as a nation have a responsibility to protect ourselves. To protect our way of life.
It is easy in what is perilously close to being a time of war to think of nothing but getting a bigger hammer. If he hits me, I will simply hit him back harder. Perhaps, in fact, we ought to have hit him back first. Maybe that would solve everything? Or maybe not.
It would be easy for us to slip right back into the Mcarthy mindset of the 1950's, having learned absolutely nothing in the past half a century. It was 1949 when George Orwell wrote about what happens when government interferes too much with the citezens' private lives. Do we want for him to have been right after all?
We Americans are now being called on to look into our hearts and weigh our freedoms against protecting our national identity. A difficult proposition for a country whose national identity is freedom. A country under attack because of our freedoms. Now more then ever it is vitally important that we not let go of those freedoms. That is just what the terrorists want us to do.
Sad that this is modded funny instead of insightful. It's true. If you don't like what $CORP does with your information, you find another instance of $CORP to use. Finding $GOV doesn't work that way, and $GOV can do a lot more to your process than can $CORP.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
However, some of the things being proposed on the technology front, (specifically Encryption Backdoors), will do absolutely nothing to make us more secure, and will in fact, make us less secure. All it does is show us how ignorant our legislators are w/r/t technology. Terrorists won't upgrade to the Govt-approved Crypto software, or will encrypt their messages before using it (just using Pronouns can go a long way.). Non-terrorists will have traded some security for absolutely nothing. When terrorists find the back door, we'll all be in trouble.
I know this and you know this, but I just don't have the heart to write Hillary or Chuck (my senators) and tell them this while the state and the country mourns.
Hey, I think you guys replied to the wrong person. :^)
I was pointing out that the passengers of Flight #93 were able to defend themselves to the extent that they were able to thwart their kidnappers. Yes they died, but they had the choice and they took it. And I'm sure that we're all thankful that they had the resolve to do so.
If they'd all been armed would it have come out differently? Perhaps. Perhaps the terrorists wouldn't have tried taking over the plane in the first place. Perhaps the passengers would've restored order. Perhaps half the passengers would've died due to friendly fire on the plane, and the plane would still be hijacked. Maybe the plane would have been explosively decompressed due to some idiot taking a loaded weapon onto a plane.
You (in general) don't know what might/might not have happened, and to tell you the truth all the 'Monday Morning Coaching' that's going on is slightly disgusting.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
Having a gun on an airplane doesn't protect you from another person with a gun on the same plane. All he needs to do is shoot at any of the windows and you're in a virtually uncontrollable 28,000 foot free-fall. Of course, he probably won't have to cause Mr "I live to blow away prairie dawgs with my AK47" would have already shot through the window trying to "protect" his redneck self.
This may be just the kind of mechanism that is needed here.
Paul Leader
...is when are we going to stop oppressing other countries? When are WE going to stop remaking other nations in our self righteous image?
When iraqi's saw American's destroying their cities, they felt the exact same way we all felt when we saw the trade center get destroyed. When serbians saw American warships dropping bombs on their hospitals, you can bet they wanted so badly to hurt us back.
But Americans live in this little dream world where they can go around the globe bullying anyone and everyone and expect no retribution. That dream has ended. Those people were not cowards who did this, I dare say that very few of our elected officials have the guts to die for something they believe in, but that's exactly what the people who did these things did. I'm not saying they're heroes, but I am saying that Americans should wake up and smell the coffee. These people hate our war machine and the businesses that finance and manipulate it so much, they are willing to give their lives to rid the world of it.
Only emotional tripe sees it as anything else. Anyone with half an ounce of reason left in them will ask themselves "Why do they hate us so much?" An objective look at our foreign policy of the last 50 years will turn up an obvious answer. Just pretend that America was on the recieving end of all the campaigns that we dished out, and very quickly you can clearly see the hate that we have fostered towards ourselves around the globe.
The curse causeless does not come. Neither does a man harvest grapes where he plants brambles. You do not reap peace where you have sown war. Anyone who wants you to believe otherwise has a hidden agenda, or is a complete idiot.
We need to change our foreign policy and to quit fostering hate among the nations. This makes alot more sense than giving up the very things which make America great, our civil liberties. "Good will and free trade with all, entangling alliances with none."
God Bless America and my fellow Americans who have been harmed by these bombings. My advocation of peace and a change of our unjust foreign policy, does not in any way mean I think what happened was just. It was horrific, and I have shed more than a few tears for the pain that has been visited to all those families out there. My heart goes out to you, but we must not be ruled by emotions, but by reason, and we must not make decisions based on fear. Fear is a bigger threat to our nation than any terrorist.
Show me an effect without cause and then I'll believe in chaos.
It shouldn't need mentioning that the source code to crypto and steno are already in the hands of nearly every orginisation on the planet. Making it illegal now would be like making the secret of how to make an A-bomb illegal after it was published in the New York Times.
Being the patriotic person that I am, I want my government to spend my money wehre it will have the most effect against these types of evils. History has shown that this is not the place. Did internment of the Japs and price controlls really help us win WWII? did the suspenion of Habius Corpus and freedom of the press really help us win the Civil War?
Actually, in times like this liberties should be maximized. A 2nd terrorist wave would be much less effective if everyone on a plane was 'required' to carry a knife. People wanting to turn in terrorists, but not reveal their identies would feel alot more secure with TRUE internet privacy. What if security units stationed at the top of the WTC were allowed to purchase anti-aircraft missles?
and we should be asking serious questions like, did our war on drugs drive up the price of afgan narcotics helping finance the Talaban? Did our overly restrictive immigration policy lead to chanels of established smuggelers that the terrorists could have used. Chanels that would not have been there if we had a reasonable policy for letting in people who honestly want to work here.
I have two comments regarding this article, and the situation in general.
First, a quote from the article: But people have the right to go to work without buildings falling on them, too. There is no provision of such a right anywhere in the Constitution. Inventing "rights" so that people can argue a case is an abuse, and pollutes the discussion. What people have a right to is life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Their right to life was infringed; nothing stated about buildings. This sort of tactic was frequently used in the late 80's and early 90's when everybody thought rights grew on trees... right to fresh water, right to be paid the same as a more qualified person doing a similar job, etc. If you're going to argue law, be a lawyer first. FWIF, IANAL either, just annoyed.
Second and more importantly, technology is a tool. If you were to replace all the details of the terrorists using computers, using Zip disks, and so forth with them knowing how to drive cars, calling people on the telephone, and similar commonplace tools that are familiar to everyone (today), the analogy holds that people unfamiliar with those tools would wish to restrict them!!! This happened at the turn of the century when horse and buggy was common and cars were not. Legislation was introduced to keep cars from scaring horses, people, and upsetting towns. The fear is less that of terrorists using technology against us, but rather of technology itself. By reducing the tool's utility, our government can only accomplish a reduction of the users of those tools. Terrorists will find other ways.
What concerns me most is that people somehow think we've become insecure physically through use of intellectual technology. I'm sorry, but the attacks were purely physical. The communication leading up to it was what they are attacking. Rather, focus on preventing the physical attacks and leave communication alone.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Fine, except that after 9/11, you have to assume that that's going to happen no matter what. Frankly, I'll take the 1% chance of survival that Buford and his piece give me over the 0% chance that the hijackers are going to give me.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
What the fuck is the matter with you people ? Katz lives a short distance from the Site of the disaster... he posts a well-written article about the potential change in perspective in YRO, drawn from his own recent experience... and what follows ? "STFU Katz". Do you even read the articles anymore ? This isn't intended so much as an information piece as it is a thought piece. If you don't have anything interesting to say, then STFU Snapple boy.
I alternate between posting +5 and -1 Comments. Karma: +53 -47 = 6
And these children have the right to expect that their government will not fail in protecting them. Let's be honest here, I felt a vulnerability that I've never felt before and also that my Government let me down. This is the same government that was elected to protect it's citizens and it failed to do just that. If the Government needs to propose more strict guidelines when it comes to my safety, go for. Video tape my face, read my email and tap my phone, I don't care and do you know why I don't care? I don't care because I'm not a criminal. I don't plan to kill and hurt thousands of innocent people.
These changes cannot be temporary either. The terrorists have been planning this attack for years and they have proved to me that they are patient enough to wait until the security of the country lessons to make their next attack, even if it take five-ten years.
I'm flying halfway around the world in less than a week and I expect to see guards with guns, police dogs and encounter long lines. If this means I land safely, so be it. As far as I'm concerned we can't be protected enough.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
"I'm sorry Osama, we could only hijack four planes instead of ten."
"Why you infidel? Allah will not be pleased!"
"Well, the other six leaders had drives that developed the 'Click of Death' and couldn't read the plans."
"I'll give you Click of Death!!!!!"
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Taking away essential freedoms does not guarantee security. In fact, reduced freedom can often reduce security. If we had a police state, sure we would have a somewhat easier time nailing terrorists. But how secure would you really be? You've just traded the occasional terrorist for an ever-present government tyrant.
It is our freedoms that *provide* our security. Restrictions on governmental/police powers promote the fairness and honesty that enable all citizens to be safe. This is why we require warrants before allowing the government to spy on you or search your property. This is why the police have to have probable cause to arrest you, rather than because "he looked like he was up to no good". If we give up these kind of freedoms in an attempt to fight terrorists, we'll only be less secure. And the terrorists will have won.
It's interesting to note that of all the countries in the world, Americans are probably the safest. And we're the most free. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I'm all for giving the government new tools to help in the fight against terrorism. Reform wiretap laws to have wiretaps be on a per-person, not per-phone basis. Expand the ability to wiretap in cyberspace to match the equivalent in phonetap law. These will help fight terrorism without destroying our freedoms.
Other proposals do the opposite. They remove freedoms without helping the terrorist fight. Mandated encryption backdoors or bans on encryption are a good example of this. While they would appear to help, they really wouldn't. Terrorists would just get their crypto from abroad, while ordinary citizens are now more susceptible to the snooping of cr/hackers and the government.
What is really needed is a cool-headed assessment of what we can do to promote security without jeopardizing our freedom and our way of life. Decreasing our freedoms will only decrease our security in the long term. Let's make ourselves more secure, not less.
I think crypto-guy Bruce Schneier put it well when he said:
"The ideals we uphold during a crisis define who we are. Freedom and liberty have a price, and that price is constant vigilance so it not be taken from us in the name of security. Ben Franklin said something that was often repeated during the American Revolutionary War: 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' It is no less true today."
OK -- get back to me when the government has established a credible track record of prosecuting its agents and sending them to prison (the real kind, not Club Fed) when they commit such abuses. As it is, these guys get away with murder (literally, as in the case of Lon Horiuchi).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Those who are shouting loudest about freedoms are those who were least (physically) affected by Tuesday's catastrophe.
Note that I emphasise the physically part. Everyone on the planet (well, maybe with the exception of some stone-age tribes in the Amazon jungle) was emotionally affected. The biggest distinguishing factor was the physical impact. The loss of a family member or friend; or even just being in New York has altered some people's worlds drastically.
Yes, I really do believe it's that polarized, and yes, I really do believe that many of the arguments are entirely selfish ones. Me, me, me. Give it a rest! There happen to be 5,999,999,999+ other people who happen to be affected by all of this. For once, humanity needs to think on a GLOBAL scale, not merely on what they can personally get out of it.
To those who advocate the loss of freedoms -- exactly what is this supposed to achieve?
Ok, now to those who argue that freedoms should be protected at all costs...
The bottom line is that NEITHER approach works. No great surprise. You cannot add an unbalanced approach to an unbalanced situation, and get a balanced society.
It is impossible to prevent these kinds of hostilies by adding yet more hostility to the equation. The maths is very simple, but those in England and Ireland learned that it is also painful to accept. The only answer to war is peace and the only answer to factionalism is unity.
Sure, there's still violence in England and Ireland, but people aren't living in fear that pubs in Birmingham, or shopping centers in London or Manchester are going to turn to smouldering rubble the next day. Disarmament on a real scale has become a very real possibility. A BIG change from the last 20 years, where bomb drills were routine in schools, celebrities got gunned down or blown up, and transport systems were regularly targetted.
There may very well be "sleepers" in the American population, agents from all sorts of countries. America has probably more than a few of its own in other countries. The ethics and international legality of such agents can be debated to the ends of the earth, with no solution likely.
But if there ARE "others" amongst us, how are they remaining others? How are they able to have zero empathy for those they live around, every day of their lives? (After all, if they DID have empathy, they could not do anything to harm those they cared about. Empathy is a far stronger force than all the agencies in the world.)
In short, why are Americans so bloody frigid that Afghans can live here for many years and not gain one iota of compassion? Sure, they're the ones who flew those planes, but ALL OF US are responsible for creating a world in which they were emotionally capable of doing so.
THAT is the key to all of this. Meaningless phrases and turgid responses don't bring people closer. They are the wall we hide behind, to avoid people. We avoided them, alright. We avoided them so bloody well that 18 of those people decided to wipe out 6,000+ others.
Pink Floyd has it absolutely right. Our callousness, coldness, cruelty, emotional abuse, our entire self-centered perspective, are just bricks in The Wall. And, as their video described, The Wall leads to militancy, extremism and violence. Just as we've seen in Afghanistan.
The choice would seem to be simple - polarity and the continued building of The Wall, or tolerence & peace.
I know which I'd prefer, but I also know which way the world is heading. Does anyone have a spare cryogenics facility they can lend me?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The abridgment of our rights is in no way a "win" for terrorists. Yes, it is a loss for us, but I have trouble with the idea that a bunch of l33t h4x0rs not being able to sit around chatting about their latest music swaps in total anonymity is anywhere near the loss of, say, containment around the Monticello Nuclear Power plant, just NW of Minneapolis (leading to 7 figure death tolls in the Minneapolis area and the forced evacuation of everything between here and around South Bend). A light plane loaded down with fuel could break through quite easily, with a clean hit. That, however, requires organization and planning. They need schematics of the plant, they need access to a plane (which will either be registered or suspiciously unregistered), they need to make use of a legitimate airport to avoid blowing up on take-off with all the bouncing barrels of gas, etc. The FBI has had remarkable success preventing this sort of thing by knowing what to look for. But over the last few years, they've increasingly lost the ability to look.
And there's the big hole in the "Oh no! We're losing our freedoms!" position. Let's say that we give every single government emplyee the right to read everyone's email and access everyone's web habits and everything else. We STILL haven't lost any "privacy" that we had 20 years ago. Human's have never had anything like the ability for anonymous, private communications that we've developed in the last 3-5 years. It's NOT something inherant in the human condition. It's something we allot to ourselves, and, as such, needs to be alloted reasonably. Now, when you've aquired a controling interested in every internet backbone in the country, you can make everything private and anonymous. Until then, you have NO RIGHTS not allocated you by contract or law. You're using an artificial communications system owned and maintained by other people, for which you're not even playing close to enough to cover the costs incurred by your usage.
Still, I can't help but think that you've forgotten why those rights are granted. They're granted because we live in a country that was formed out of a history of oppression. Those rights are not there simply because people like them. They exist as safeguards and protections against the type of governments that oppress their people, that forbid them basic human rights. The rights to privacy ensure that our government can't simply weed out its detractors. It exists to prevent our government from becoming a powerful tyrant. It's already powerful, and it is through the vigilant exercise of our rights that it doesn't become a tyrant, capable of disposing of its detractors or those who might possibly restrict the exercise of that power.
I think you've written a great piece that needs to be part of the discussion. And I agree that some of our rights may need to be temporarily adjusted. But any sort of permanant abridgement of the basic rights that define our country is treading on very dangerous ground. The basic rights that I'm talking about, the ones that define our country, are set forth in our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the amendments to our Constitution. Any permanant restrictions of those rights will open up a threat that is at least as big as the threat of terrorist attack: a powerful and tyranical government with no restrictions on what it can and will do. And that threat is more insidious than terrorist attacks. It kills silently, not in one big explosion. It takes out people with very little fan fare, and whatever does happen to make the news, it spins into crime fighting, or outright suppresses altogether.
That threat is real. It's defenses have only existed for 225 years. The rest of human history is riddled with governments that tyranized their people. In our attempts to address a terrorist threat, we should not forget the other threats that we must always continue to address.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Here's the letter I sent to my congressmen, composed in AbiWord.
Lester Marks
5905 North Hills Drive
Raleigh NC 27609-4237
(919)-782-2009
To the Honorable Senator John Edwards
Dear Senator Edwards,
I am concerned about the future of email and privacy in my email communications. In the wake of our National Tragedy, it is my understanding that the Justice Department is asking for legislation granting them less restrictions on obtaining and using a wiretap, both for telephone and internet communications.
With any greater power granted, lies the possibility for abuse. I fear that wider use of wiretaps in the way that the Justice department proposes will lead to abuse.
Email is commonly assumed to be a private communication between the sender and the recipient. In reality, it can be intercepted and read, much the same way that a postcard can be read while in transit. Encryption is a technology that secures a message or document so that only the sender and the intended recipient can read it, much the same way that an envelope prevents mail handlers or others from casually reading your postal mail. Encrypted mail cannot be considered secure if it can be decrypted and read by anyone other than the intended recipient.
As a private citizen, and one of your constituents living in Raleigh, I do not want my private communications spied upon by Law Enforcement without probable cause and a court order. If, as I fear, greater power over wiretaps is given to Law Enforcement, I will increase my usage of encryption in my emails and other communications. If legislation is introduced that requires encryption to have "back-doors" that allow Law Enforcement to read my encrypted emails, then not only will I have suffered the loss of my right to keep my private communications private, but terrorists and criminals will still have use of the encryption technology that doesn't have "back-doors" for Law Enforcement.
I understand the need for swift action in the wake of the National Tragedy, but I don't want to lose the civil liberties and freedoms that I currently enjoy, in the name of security measures, temporary or permanent. If you vote for or approve any legislation that grants wider use of wiretaps and surveillance on U.S. citizens' communications, I will be sure to vote for your opponent when you next run for re-election.
Sincerely,
So the citizens of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union who had no freedom were the most secure people in history? Somehow the dozens of millions of them that were murdered by their own government seem to contradict that
As interesting your comments are, these words "people are able to justify revolution" is permisable within the constitution. SO yes, we can go to war with ourselves and we can loose all our inalienable rights.
I will say this. I am greatful that I have these freedoms. I know of others that don't even have half of ours.
-onepoint
if you see me, smile and say hello.
You didn't have to do anything as blatant as what you describe to be killed.
In Nazi germany 6 million were killed for just having the wrong parents.
I Stalinist Russia the security forces, like every one else, had production targets and has to produce a certain number of executions or face the consequences. Anyone who was within convenient reach could and did get killed.
In the UK, the governement here _still_ have the ability to imprision without trial indefinitely on the statute books, when it was brought in a "temporary" measure from 1971-1975. Operation Internment had a terrible backlash which, instead of reducing the problem, gained tremendous support for those imprisoned. The UK act ("prevention of terrorism act") still has to be renewed annually, but it always is - who would vote against it with a name like that? So, the whole idea made things worse, and even the clause of an annual review wasn't a sufficent counterbalance to remove it from the laws.
Giving up freedoms to defend freedoms, is like comiting suicide in self defence.
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
You (in general) don't know what might/might not have happened, and to tell you the truth all the 'Monday Morning Coaching' that's going on is slightly disgusting.
... the only real deterrence is that of mass destruction of the thing is fired while in flight, a deterrent which probably doesn't do a whole hell of a lot to stop a suicide terrorist.
I agreed with all of your points until you said this. Monday Morning Quarterbacking is exactly what is needed now, to analyze and ponder where we made mistakes, what tradeoffs we need to make to thwart these sorts of murderous people in the future, and so on.
The argument that a plane full of well-armed passengers might have had better luck against an armed hijacker vs. a more stringent effort to keep arms off the plane is a valid one to make. I don't agree with it (everyone could have carried on 4" knives up until last Tuesday, and some passengers almost certainly did, at least in the form of a swiss army knife, yet the results were inconclusive). Everyone having a gun in a pressurized aircraft is more akin to everyone having an H-Bomb strapped to their back
The answers aren't easy or obvious, but decrying discussion as "disgusting" is IMHO not at all helpful.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Abrogation of basic human rights caused this problem. A human should never be denied the ability to defend him/herself.
This may be the most reprehensible, and absurd, claim that I've yet heard in the wake of this tragedy. If everyone on board airplanes had guns, how many cases of air rage would have ended in tragic deaths or even plane crashes? How many stupid yahoos would be looking for an excuse to pull a gun and be a hero? "I thought he was reaching for his gun so I started emptying my clip..." How many inebriated passengers would accidentally discharge their guns, taking the plane down? How many distraught, disturbed, and jilted passengers would decide to take their own lives and the lives of everyone else by starting a gun battle? The terrorists would be thrilled by your idea. They could sit at home and watch passengers take down U.S. commercial aircraft with disturbing regularity.
No "basic human right" was taken away. If you are such a weak little man that you can't defend yourself without a gun, you are a truly pathetic specimen. If you are not man enough to travel without your gun, then stay home. The brave passengers on flight 93 who overpowered the hijackers would have been disgusted by some pussy like you cowering in the back of the plane saying "I can't do anything because I don't have my gun."
Very true. Here in the States we have an excellent example of a 'Temporary Measure' that was put into place, even though it goes against the intent of our Constitution, and extended to a permanent basis.
It's called our Federal Income Tax, and was made permanent in 1913... 18 years after the Supreme Court determined it unconstitutional.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
It seems to me that Bush and Co. are working on the Lt. Calley theory:
"We had to destroy the Constitution in order to save it". -- G.W. Bush, 2001
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Yes John, when the government proposes compromising freedom for security, i do have a knee jerk response. See, it's because the government is, in essence, asking me to trust it to use such legislation for the purposes that it was intended. Well, as the old saying goes, trust is earned.
When I see federal anti-crack-house legislation being used to prosecute the organizer of a music festival, I shudder to think what they will be able to do with anti-terrorism laws (that's right, they're attempting to send a man from new orleans to jail for the rest of his life because he organized an event where there was likely to be drug use despite the large security presence looking for drugs!).
I do not advocate drug use...in fact I belive that it is one of the scourges of our society. But I fail to see how drug sniffing dogs walking around an airport will increase the safety of air travel (This was the case in many American airports this past week). I can see the headline now..."The terrorists had no guns, knives or weapons of any kind. They were able to quickly gain control of the airplane thanks to the two kilos of uncut heroin that they managed to sneak on board."
It's not that I don't advocate security measures. They are necessary. But there's more than one knee-jerk reaction happening here. The government reacts by passing any peice of legislation that "could have helped prevent this tragedy." We need to have a healthy debate about every security measure that we enact. We can't let the emotions of this past week cloud our judgement, resulting in the complete freedom of the justice dep't to do whatever they want.
</$0.02>
...computer science taught me that two wrongs don't make a right, but two rights make a wrong...
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
On April 19, 1993, the US attorney general ended a standoff near Waco, TX with one of the worst outcomes possible. US Gov action taken during the standoff is universally denounced as reactionary and far from ideal. Forces surrounded a compound of religious extremists for an expensive standoff, during which both sides suffered severe casualties. In 2001, US forces will again surround a group of religious extremists for an expensive conflict, from which nothing will be accomplished other than slaughter and the incitement of millions of similar extremists. The slaughter and enemy-making will be justified by the increased approval rating US politicians will receive as their angry redneck constituents watch people die on television.
/. readers out there with historical knowledge of the American Revolution, it would be interesting to know what kind of "terrorist acts" the rebels performed on the British Empire to help gain their freedom. Muslims that support Osama (and there are many more of them than a few Palenstinians and Afghanis) see themselves the same way American rebels viewed themselves, as victims of an evil empire's imperialistic policies.
No matter how powerful and frightening the US military is, US citizens will never be free from "terrorism" by radicals. As long as an establishment exists, there will be extremist rebels that will attempt to thwart the establishment through violence. Just as the sun creates shadows, authority and power will always create opposition and rebellion. Violent, religion-based exremeists (quite willing to die for their cause) will only grow stronger as their opposition (the authority and power of the US goverment) is exercised.
If there are any
Certainly, we would all be physically safer if we lived in a totalitarian regime with no privacy protection. Would that be worth the cost?
Unfortunately, that is not true. We MIGHT be safer from external threats. But we would be wide open to threats from the members of the regime - both abuse by individual functionaries and institutionalized mayhem.
Historically this has been a recurring theme, with the INternal attacks amassing a body count that dwarfs the extrenal. Consider the Gulags of the Soviet Union, NAZI Germany, the Inquisition, the religious wars throughout Europe just a few hundred years ago, Apartheit, "Ethnic Clensing" in a dozen countries, just to name a few.
The US is far from immune, both historically and recently. The Trail of Tears, the Civil War, the Klan, the Zoot Suit Riots, Ruby Ridge and Waco, again to name a few.
But despite the distortions presented by the media and government-school history, people are far safer in the US than in virtually all other countries. And one of the greatest factors is that when attacked, individually or in mass, they have the ability to fight back. This is by design.
The government can't be everywhere and guard everything and everyone all the time. But every competent adult could easily have his or her own personal armed guard: theirselves.
There is NOTHING magic about the necessary skils. They are easy, quick, and inexpensive to acquire. Police and private guards spend only a few hours learning them. Civilians who chose to go armed generally also chose to train themselves to a far higher standard than that required for police. They have a far better record of defending against "bad guys" and NOT damaging bystanders.
And this is EXACTLY what the founders of the country intended: For the individual citizens to be armed. For them to be their OWN armed guards and their OWN army. So that an armed guard was always available when needed. So that the army was the size of the population. So that the guard and the army always had the citizen's interest, rather than their own or their employer's, as their primary motivation.
The hijacked airliners each had 5 to 6 hijackers and over 50 passengers. If even one in ten of them had been armed the hijackers would never have been able to take down the towers. And if an unknown fraction of the passengers had a habit of traveling armed the hijaclers never would have tried.
But the passengers were NOT armed - even though some of them MIGHT have been able to be armed while going about their daily lives - because the government DISARMED them. And as a result the hijackers were able to convert aircraft into incindeary missiles, and kill over ten thousand people who had NOT chosen to go through the airport search and board the ill-fated planes.
Clinton talked of 10,000 new policemen - even though his program produced nothing of the sort. But if relegalizing concealed carry resulted in even 10% of the population chosing to carry, you're talking over 20,000,000 do-it-yourself armed guards, "working" double shifts, scattered quite evenly through the population (and concentrated at potential trouble spots).
Experience with CCW shows that such people are far less of a danger to each other than professionals would be (even in the total absense of official misconduct). But can you imagine a small band of terrorists trying to pull something in such an environment?
And with that level of physical security who needs wiretaps?
(I'd go into that subject too, but I have to take off now.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The problem of protecting a nation does not truly lie in the scope of a government.
The government may orchestrate this defense in a time of full scale conventional war, but, it will never be able to cope with the granularity required to stop one dedicated person causing horrifying harm.
That responsibility lies with the people. And it's a responsibility that happens when the questions of personal rights stop being considered.
The example that displays this most, is the one of the plane where the passengers voted to try to overpower the hijackers.
Not all laws and regulations in the world could force a group of human beings to stand up, and take responsibility for a greater number of other lives, at a likely complete cost to themselves.
Each of those who stood up, as individuals taking responsibility for the protection of the lives of countless others, as free people, did, and always will have more power to protect the world from greater harm than any government passing gargantuan laws and restricting freedom.
I think it's something understood by almost every doctor, nurse, fireman, policeman, and so on...
Sometimes, bad things happen. Nothing could stop them happening.. But when free people stand up, and take responsibility for the lives of others, the magnitude of these disasters is vastly reduced.
Sometimes, acting early can prevent the whole thing. Not always, but sometimes..
With the larger plans of terror, part of the planning is to make sure you operate in a manner that nobody knows what you plan. For every restriction on communication, then there will be one of myriads of ways of communicating that those who wish ill will stop using, at least blatantly. It will not, however, stop them communicating.
The solution of safety to travel and work, and live isn't, and never will be, in the realms of the powers of any Government, no matter how many measures are taken, or how strict the police state.
It's not a question of telling the children of those that were lost that the action being taken is to remove the freedom of many in an effort to prevent this kind of thing. That's tantamount to telling them they're useless, and there's nothing they can do. It's to let them know that they can help prevent it happening again, and they matter in the world. They may be a single person, but many single people with a common wish are what changes the world. When everyone has the wish to protect others, that's when you'll really be safe. Not when a government tells you.
I apoligise in advance, if this post offends any who are affected by the devastation. I just see the true heroes and the people who made the most difference are the people who stood up, and tried their best to help. No amount of bullets and bombs and political posturing will ever do as much good as those individual souls acting together for the benefit of all.
That's just the way I feel.
Malk
We need to get out from under this rock that GW has put our country.
We've been under a rock for a lot longer than the last eight months. While I agree with the rest of your point, I don't think this has anything to do with the current administration.
Nope, no sig
Crisis and Leviathan is a book by Robert Higgs that looks at how government power grows during crises, and does not shrink back nearly as much when the crise is over.
I'll take the liberty of quoting an Amazon reader review:
Reviewer: Donald J. Boudreaux from Irvington-on-Hudson, NY:
Robert Higgs is a first-rate economist and economic historian who sets out a provocative thesis -- namely, that governments exploit crises (real and fabricated) as excuses to grow and to strip people of their wealth and liberties. Higgs skillfully and carefully tests this thesis against history. The thesis stands. Governments do indeed exploit crises as opportunities to confiscate ever-greater powers. After each crisis, the amount of power recently added to government's stock might shrink somewhat, but very seldom back to what it was prior to the crisis. This is one of the most important and compelling books published during the 1980s.
As it happens, this is Hollywood movie fiction rather than the actual physics of the situation. Sorry.
There were two partial victories that day: because of them, the White House and the Capitol are intact (but rather the Pentagon and some Pennsylvania countryside were hit). The only thing that could have saved the World Trade Towers would have been passengers willing to take out the terrorists (hopefully with weapons adequate to the task) -- ESR is right about that. And (as others have observed), if this had been tried during the forties or fifties, the passengers would have been a lot more willing to take on the terrorists than they are now.
Treat it as an ecology-modeling problem, with populations of terrorists and citizens, with some fraction of the latter armed. Under all realistic initial conditions (citizen population much larger than terrorist population), where the armed fraction is positive, the terrorists get killed off and the situation assymptotically tends to negligible terrorist activity. The bloody-minmded way to think about is is that quite a bit of damage may be done while achieving this limit, but (realistically) you do run out of terrorists before running out of citizens.
And this admittedly-oversimplified kind of model ignores an important psychological impact: the last thing a terrorist wants to do is to appear stupid and futile:
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Many of the laws that abut privacy and public saftey and policy are from a time where the infrastructure was built owned and operated by the government. Think roads, bridges, canals. Think the early days of the net. Flash forward and much of the infrastructure is private like the phone systems, the internet now, private databases, ariline ticket systems, weblogs and so on. So the question you have to ask yourself is just exactly who does the expansion of these government privileges to search and monitor help? Does it help them, does it help WalMArt, does it help WorldCom, does it help you? Sometimes those are tricky questions. Now certainly there is some merit to changing the wiretapping law to follow a PERSON insead of a FIXED NUMBER but what is the new context for requesting a wiretap at all? Suspicion? Someone else's vague reference to what might be you, online? The movement of your car tracked by Onstar? A cell phone call sent or received somewhere in the vicinity of your home? Those are tough questions. And partially the answer has to do with how will such and such actually help.
I still maintain that you have to follow the money. Is there not some direct benefit to be gained in breaking open international banking secrecy laws so that Swiss, Cayman, Panamanian banks can't launder the money used to kill people. And is not that benefit at least as great as the benefit to be gained by applying open ended survellience on large segments of a profiled population?
My druthers would be to draw the line between Timothy McVie's and Osama bin Laden's crew, precisely in this way: Citizenship should continue to have its full privileges, in so far as technologically possible. Noncitizens, however, should be segregated in at least the following ways: (1) no university study in sensitive areas unless they are full citizens of absolutely friendly countries which share the fundamentals of our culture, (2) no right to operate a motor vehicle, (3) full strip search before any use of public transport as at least a random possibility, (4) no right to use unsurveilled communications or encryption over communications. Because citizens' rights can be preserved at the cost of further raising the borders to non-citizens, let's do it!
Sure, we'll get occassional local kooks doing harm. That may be the acceptable cost of freedom - sometimes a few score of lives, but not thousands. For the freedom of the road, we also tolerate traffic deaths. The difference with foreigners is that the cost of lack of vigilence there is as demonstrated in the thousands. Curtailing citizens' freedoms to stop this is like poisoning the rats to keep away the wolves, at best.
Yes, we're an immigrant country. Every country has been beyond our original home in Africa. Our borders are much too open, especially to those from cultures that don't share the values of civilization. To remedy that there are two things to do: (1) spread the values of civilization, yes, even in a crusade and (2) close the borders to those without our values.
Okay, now show how this is wrong, how we can preserve both the rights of citizens and the rights we have so far generously granted to foreigners. Because if it's a choice, I think we ought to preserve the rights of citizens which establish the foundation for our social and material civilization, without which foreigners wouldn't be attracted here anyway. So let's largely lock them out until they attain civilized maturity. Again, these are dark thoughts. But far darker the thought of taking from ourselves our own hard-earned liberties.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The argument "we allow companies do it, why not feds" does not fly for one very simple reason - there's no "voting with your feet", or wallet, or whatever, when it comes to government - we are all its customers, regardless of our desire (or lack thereof). If you don't like people at RadioShack nosing at your phone number - don't shop there. But what do you do if you don't like Carnivore, or national ID? Tough. Besides, no government measure advertised as "temporary" or "emergency" has ever been such. Who remembers now that 1942 payroll tax witholding directive was sold as war necessity (can you imagine the repercussions on the current tax system if everybody received what they earned, and then had to cut an actual check to IRS every three month)?
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
If one could be reasonably assured that that government involvement would actually be effective. It's been a long, long time since most people reacted to the phrase ``Hi. We're from the Government and we're here to help.'' with anything but derisive laughter.
From what I've been reading in the papers and hearing on the radio and TV, the government had been receiving intelligence that could have warned them of these attacks for some time (as long as years) and little-to-nothing was done. IMHO, new laws that further restrict citizens' freedoms and reduce privacy do nothing to offset the incompetence of the people who failed to act on the intelligence they had in their hands. If the reports of some listening posts receiving 2,000,000 messages per hour are correct -- heck, if it was 2M/day it'd still be an impressive amount -- how will collecting even more information eliminate the terrorist threat?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
The Washington Post has a very nice article about the only member of the house who voted against the grain last week.
...
Congresswoman Against Use of Force
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2001; Page C01
"We need to step back," said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). "We're grieving. We need to step back and think about this so that it doesn't spiral out of control. We have to make sure we don't make any mistakes."
She was walking down a hallway in the Cannon House Office Building. A plainclothes police officer hovered a few steps away, looking very serious. The Capitol Police began guarding Lee on Saturday because of death threats she received after voting against a resolution authorizing President Bush to use military force against anyone associated with last week's terrorist attacks. The resolution passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House. Lee's was the sole dissenting vote.
"In times like this," she said, "you have to have some members saying, 'Let's show some restraint.' "
Led by her police bodyguard, she moved along quickly, slipping into her office and closing the door behind her. Inside, the phone lines had shut down under an onslaught of calls from all over the country -- many of them irate, some of them downright nasty -- and her voice mailbox was too full to take any more messages.
"We've gotten thousands of calls and thousands of e-mails," she said. "People are very emotional. . . . They're frustrated and they're angry."
She's 55, a small woman with short black hair. Normally, she has a bright smile, but these days she looks sad, worried, harried. She is quick to point out that she voted to condemn last week's attacks and to allocate $40 billion to fight terrorism.
"I'm just as American and just as patriotic as anybody else," she insists.
She does not rule out military action, she says, but she voted against the authorization to use force because she opposes giving the president the sole decision on when and where to make war. "I believe we must make sure that Congress upholds its responsibilities and upholds checks and balances. This is a representative democracy and it's our responsibility."
War, she believes, is not the most effective way to fight terrorism. "Military action is a one-dimensional reaction to a multidimensional problem," she says. "We've got to be very deliberative and think through the implications of whatever we do."
This is not the first time Lee has stood alone against war. In 1999, during the crisis in Kosovo, she was the only House member to vote against authorizing President Clinton to bomb Serbia. "I'm not a pacifist," she says, "but I don't believe military action should be the only action we embark on."
Fortunately for Lee, she represents one of the most liberal congressional districts in the United States -- California's 9th, which includes Berkeley and Oakland. It's the district that was represented by another antiwar dissident -- Ronald Dellums -- for nearly 28 years. Lee served as Dellums's chief of staff for a decade before she was elected to the California State Assembly in 1990. When Dellums retired in 1998, she won the election to succeed him, and was reelected last year with 85 percent of the vote.
"I would have voted the same way," says Dellums, now president of Washington-based Healthcare International Management. "We need to think this through and ask, 'Are there better ways to do this?' "
"I agonized over this vote all week," she says. "I searched my conscience. I talked to many people. Ultimately, on some votes, you have to vote the way your conscience dictates."
Her agony was exacerbated by the knowledge that her chief of staff, Sandre Swanson, was mourning the death of his cousin Wanda Green, who was a flight attendant on the hijacked United jet that crashed in Pennsylvania.
"I support her decision," Swanson says. "The principle on which she based her decision was that somebody should stand up and say that only Congress has the power to declare war. . . . People say she was unpatriotic. I think it was very patriotic."
"I admire the courage of Barbara Lee," says Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who spent the 1960s in the front lines of the civil rights movement. "She demonstrated raw courage to stand up and vote the way she did. She stood alone -- one against 420. Several other members wanted to be there also but at the same time, like me, they didn't want to be seen as soft on terrorism."
Lewis voted to authorize military action but, he says, he came close to joining Lee in opposition. "I was probably 99 percent of the way there in my heart and my soul," he says, "but in the end I wanted to send the strongest possible message that we can't let terrorism stand."
Lee's vote is reminiscent of the first woman ever elected to Congress, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who voted against the nation's entry into World War I and World War II. It also brings to mind Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, the two senators who voted against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave President Lyndon Johnson the power to wage war in Vietnam.
On the House floor last Friday night, Lee quoted Morse: "I believe that history will record that we have made a grave mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States." She added: "Senator Morse was correct, and I fear we make the same mistake today."
Out in Oakland, Lee's vote is the subject of much debate, some of it heated, says Don Perata, the Democratic state senator who represents Lee's district.
Perata calls Lee's vote "wrongheaded" and he isn't impressed with her explanation of it. "There wasn't a lot of clarity there," he says. "I would have cast a different vote. This is a time for a united front in America, particularly in Congress."
But, he predicts, Lee's vote probably will not affect her chances for reelection.
"The district is overwhelmingly Democratic," he says. "There are probably more people who are to the left of the Democrats than there are Republicans."
Also, he adds: "Barbara is very popular here. She's just a very, very nice woman -- and in this business that counts for a lot."
On Monday, Perata says, California talk radio was abuzz with callers denouncing Lee as a communist.
"I was wincing," he says, "because that's not Barbara. She did not cast that vote because she's unpatriotic. She loves this country and its opportunities as much as anybody."
Meanwhile, back in her office on Capitol Hill, Lee was furiously working the phones, talking to constituents and local media outlets.
"I hope that when I get my message out," she says, "people will understand why I did what I did. Whether they agree with me or not, they'll understand that I want to bring these [terrorists] to justice as much as anybody else does."
She declined to speculate on the effect her vote might have on her popularity. "This was not," she says, "a poll-driven vote."
More like might Achilles, despite his magnificent armor he was brought down by an arrow to his heel.
Still, going out looking for trouble is the best way to find it. I suggest the govt. use caution, some rights (or perception therof) will need some curtailing. i.e. it's probably been decades since american citizens could exercise their 2nd amendment right, by carrying their own gun on a plane, for the common good, right?
As for wiretaps, I think the FBI and CIA already have all the ducks in a row they've needed. As for email, well, these guys didn't use encryption, they used public library computers and may or may not have written in code words.
Looking back, (read the Newsweek article on the 1993 bombing of the WTC) these people are getting more sophisticated, they worked much more smoothly than before and possibly will work more efficiently yet next time, God forbid.
Getting world governments to work together is the best method, rather holding everyone within US borders under a microscope, rights or none, it becomes moot. The point of rights, too, is probably best not argued with surviving victims and victims families, lest one comes across as some sort of whacko cut from the same fanatical cloth the killers were.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Folks, a reminder -- arguing about this here isn't going to accomplish much. The people making the decisions aren't reading Slashdot.
f m
If you have an opinion, then now is the time to express it where it matters. Send a calm, reasoned note off to your Congressperson, expressing your concerns. Postal mail generally gets more attention than email, but the sheer bulk of email can matter as well. As a reminder, you can find (and write to) your Representative via this page:
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
and find your Senators' email addresses from this one:
http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index_by_state.c
Personally, I recommend urging calm and balance at this point. If you come off as an extremist, odds are you won't be listened to. Most Congresspeople right now are feeling an enormous pressure to Do Something Now. Make clear to them that, while the people may well want action taken against the terrorist threat, we're also paying attention to what those actions are. The appropriate steps need to be carefully designed to have the maximum effect upon actual threats, while minimizing the effect on civil liberties. Legislators are used to compromise; if you make it clear that their constituency cares about both sides of the issue, it may get through to them that extremism here is a bad idea.
(I'm quite certain that at least one or two truly stupid laws are going to come out of this mess. But injecting a note of calm may help to keep the number and severity down...)
My God, that was the most lucid, insightful comment I have yet read on this subject. (Maybe Slashdot should hire you? :)
Do you mind if I put that up on my website? (comments about Katz edited out, of course)
The poll also says "if it meant more security against terrorism". To assume that losing civil liberties would achive this is naive, but I think many Americans will make that assumption.
More govt intervention in people's everyday lives won't stop terrorism, but it would give polititians something 'good' to wave around when the next election comes. I suppose they are just betting on people's anger lasting that long...
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
This isn't the historical America. This is a new America, one that has completely lost touch with its forebears.
As Ben Franklin said;
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. "
That "if" is a very big if. Quite frankly, even if we lived in a 1984 style state where we are constantly spied on, it would still be impossible to prevent terrorist attacks.
Read the Tom Clancy book 'The Sum Of All Fears,' published circa 1996. The plot revolves around some Mid East terrorists getting their hands on a nuke lost in the Six Day War by Isreal, and managing to rebuild it and use it. While you're at it, read Debt of Honor, which includes a jumbo jet being used to ram Washington, and Rainbow Six, which deals with the concept that traditional nation versus nation warfare is out, and terrorism/guerrilla warfare is in.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
What about giving up essential liberty to obtain a little permanant safety? Didn't y'all give up your Constitutional 'right to bear arms' when licenses became a requirement, for example?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
If you were watching the news around 6PM Tuesday then you'd know that the people of Afganistan were subject to terrorism too. N. Ireland isn't exactly the safest place in the world either.
The point is, that Afganistan isn't at all free, and there is limited freedom in N. Ireland. And there is still terrorism. There isn't an instance I'm aware of where a gov't released a new power it was granted even on a temporary basis. That emergency income tax measure, Amendment XVI, really faded into the night after Reconstruction didn't it?
Any freedoms we give up will not make us safer, and will never be returned to us. If you believe otherwise then you are fooling yourself.
The gov't has made clear by the DMCA & SSCA among other blatant special interest attacks on Free Speech and the right to due process under the law that it simply cannot be trusted. In the US, people used to be innocent until proven guilty. If there is no legitimate enough belief of wrongdoing to convince a federal judge then the gov't has no right to violate my privacy.
If warrants may be needed on a moment's notice then a solution that wouldn't violate the 99.999% of the population would be to have some judges on call 24/7 to authorize or deny such warrants. Unless the FBI is just fishing for terrorists, they can get warrants to read terrorists email and leave mine and the rest of the country's email alone.
Jon, there's a reason why something like this never happened in the heyday of hijacking, back in the 1970s; we had all the terrorist groups infiltrated, and half the Middle Eastern leaders on the CIA's payroll.
More Elint and Sigint won't fix this; getting rid of the stupid rules that all but prevent dealing with the folks with the information, and funding the Operations folks to get more Humint into the field, is what will solve this, assuming America doesn't decide to get out of the business of funding the other side in all these regional conflicts.
All the encryption in the world does you no good if the guy on the other end of the wire is forwarding them off to Langley in exchange for booze and hookers, and conversely all the laws against encryption in the world do you no good if the bad guys aren't saying "next week we blow up America real good, comrade" in their emails.
Keeping everybody's encryption keys on file just makes it easier to spy on the law-abiding, not the criminals.
Nobody in his right mind would support a blank check for government authorities.
Exactly. Many people are not in their right mind these days.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Any new laws to fight this new kind of war ought to be temporary, and self-expiring, perhaps subject to annual review.
It never works this way, Jon. The income tax was supposed to be temporary, to be abolished after we won *that* world war. Has it proven to be? You ought to listen more closely to libertarians when we say "War is the health of the state."
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You're perfectly correct. Just like gun control disarms victims, encryption control disarms victims. You want to protect yourself from terrorists? Use cryptography so they can't listen to you. Use crypography so they cannot pretend to be you.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Check out the Quick Vote on CNN's home page:
Would you accept more government involvement in your life if it meant more security against terrorism?
The "if" is the critial bit here. Quite a few restrictions on civil liberties may do nothing to increase security against terrorism. Indeed some may well actually be helpful to terrorists...
Most of the time, I think people here on Slashdot who hate Katz hate him because he's preaching to the choir: he wraps up Slashdotish ideas in mainstream journalistic prose, and those of us who can't stand being told what we think we already know (especially in the rhetoric of modern journalism) make fun of him and try to rip him to shreds.
Today he presented a viewpoint that was his own and probably different from the majority of slashdotters. That's the first brave part of
Katz's article. The second brave part is that he's essentially telling people -- even us intelligent tech-savy geeks who tend to think we have it all figured out -- that we too need to not simply give our usual knee jerk reactions to the situation. Yes, calling for increased eavesdropping powers and mandatory backdoors for encryption are knee-jerk reactions. But rather than jerking back, we need to education and also seriously consider what we CAN do for greater security.
Yeah, I've heard the quote: if you trade freedom for security, you'll have neither. It's partially true. But it's shallow as a complete policy guide.
It's worth some measure of hassle and even loss of privacy if we really can make society safer. Giving up a bit of convenience and privacy is not the same thing as losing freedom. I think that's what Jon's asking us to consider. That doesn't mean that we put up with patently stupid ideas like mandatory backdoors in all encryption, which likely won't help us at all, but it DOES mean that we need to seriously consider possibilities for increasing the governments capacity to watch people at the same time as putting in checks for abuse.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Katz is a proposing the eliminiation and/or restriction of rights, without any evidence that in fact this will make us safer.
Let me attempt, perhaps in vain, to address some of the issues Katz tries to raise...
But there is a new reality in the post-World Trade Center world, one that now may have to balance some rights against others and prepare for aircraft-bombs, biological and chemical attacks,and horrific assaults on civilians.
Reality didn't change - our perception of it has.
The perception is that nobody is safe anymore, and that significant measures need to be taken to provide a safe environment for American citizens.
The reality is that have always been fragile, continue to work in buildings that can collapse on impact, and some bad people exploited a specific vulnerability in airline security and the structural integrity of some buildings.
I postulate that the restriction of basic rights and freedoms will move American citizens from the frying pan into the fire. The delicate balance of power that has existed between the government and citizens for two centuries could be shifted in an irreversable fashion.
The Justice Department isn't proposing dropping all restrictions or warrants or oversight regarding wiretapping and surveillance. They propose to ease some of them. This may or may not be a good idea.
The United Kingdom took a similar measure during the height of their domestic terrorism crisis. It allowed them to hold prisoners for questioning virtually indefinitely and it lead to an unprecidented abuse of government power over its citizens.
Yes, people online have the right to keep their communications private and people have the right -- I believe -- to move online and travel in the real world without their movements being monitored and recorded by governmental authorities. But people have the right to go to work without buildings falling on them, too.
People have the right to walk down the street without being mugged or raped. When someone's right is violated, we seek justice. We find the perpetrator(s). We try them in a court, and we punish them if they're found guilty.
Our system of justice protects our rights, not by limiting other rights. People have a right to live safely, and these rights are upheld, in general, through a system of freedom and justice.
The cost, you might ask? The cost is the risk that someone could have his or her rights violated. When I walk down the street, someone could mug me. It would be illegal, and subject to prosecution and punishment, which serves as an effective deterrant and underpins a system to justice.
We generally accept the risks of walking down a street, because the likelihood of having our rights violated is relatively low. We make choices about what streets we walk down, at what time of day or night, and whom we are accompanied by.
Freedom and justice are inextricably bound together. One may not exist without the other. It is an illusion to believe that by restricting some rights, others will magically be better protected.
The government has an obligation to protect them.
The government has an obligation to uphold its system of justice. People have an obligation to protect themselves, by making choices about the circumstances they place themselves in, and by defending themselves when under assault.
This assault on 5,000 lives was an assault virtually impossible to repel. This is why justice is so important in our political system. It realizes that people will be assaulted and provides a system of consequences to punish attackers and discourage prospective attackers.
Is it really totally unreasonable for authorities to seek broader powers to follow these conversations? Wiretap laws are not adequate for teaching these kinds of criminals. Existing wiretap laws require warrants for each telephone, even though criminals and terrorists might use dozens of phones or a variety of communications systems.
It is unreasonable for citizens of the United States to be protected from unwarranted search and seizure. But more importantly, wiretaps are useless for sophisticated criminals, because these criminals have sophisticated tools (lawful or not) at their disposal to avoid government surveillance.
I'm not just talking about cryptography. I'm also talking about steganography. You might outlaw cryptography, and it might be quasi-enforceable, but the result is users of cryptography will revert to steganography to keep their covert communication secret. This is ultimately unenforceable, because it is virtually undetectable.
And, where will be be? To borrow a phrase from the PGP movement (which they borrowed from the NRA), if cryptography is outlawed, only outlaws (and government) will have cryptography.
Freedom comes at a price. The price is that we run some risk of having our rights violated. So far, we have accepted the tradeoff, and generally relied on justice to prevail if a violation occurred.
If enough people talk and vote like Katz, America will no longer be the land of the free. At best, maybe Americans can call their nation the land of the safe.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
I was reading the link I suggested, and went on a rabbit trail regarding then Chief Justice ... the name stuck, I foobar'd ... like the times I use they're when I should use their ... comes from spending too much time writing crap like
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Marshall's involvement with habeas corpus
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healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
I assume that Jon Katz is allowed to post his views on the main page of Slashdot because he's a journalist, not just another geek. But part of being a journalist is checking your facts. This is something Jon obviously did not do. This makes him just another geek posting a biased uninformed rant that belongs in comments, not on the main page.
We've all heard US lawmakers and law-enforcers on TV the last few days saying the same thing as Jon in almost the same words: "Existing wiretap laws require warrants for each telephone, even though criminals and terrorists might use dozens of phones or a variety of communications systems." This simply isn't the case.
Emergency Wiretap
Roving Wiretap
Read the full version http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2518.html
Jon says:
That's what many of us are arguing, that they are obligated to get warrants. I don't want my local cop shop being able to decide to tap the phones at the local mosque, just because it's a known muslim hang-out.
My right to free speech allows me to post this message without law-enforcement officers arresting me. If lawmakers could make a law that would prevent me from "being torn to bits or crushed in a collapsing inferno" I would be all for it. Unfortunately they can't. There's no question that the rights of the people killed in the disaster were violated. The question is, do we need new laws, or do we need better enforcement of existing laws? Before I give up my right to privacy, free speech, and free mobility I want to be convinced that giving up those rights will actually help guarantee the rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for everybody else.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that we should let these people go unpunished. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't hunt down the sources that feed these "feral dogs" and wipe them out. What I'm getting at is, how valuable are our freedoms and our liberties to us? Are they things we will throw away out of fear for our lives or will we hold on to them even if it means some risk.
I do not with to exalt what these people have done but I think ultimately a lot of the outcome of this is going to be tied to moral fortitude. Who's willing to fight the hardest, and what are they fighting for? They are fighting for some twisted interpetation of a religious doctrine. What are we fighting for? National soveriegnty? Personal safety?
Personally I think the only thing that makes us american boils down to the rights and liberties set forth in the constitution. To destroy that, in an effort to weed out terrorists, destroys ourselves. Are we willing to sacrifce, not just for protection of a sovereign nation, but also for protection of the principals which allowed it to thrive?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
But changing our views on privacy issues, from the terrorist's perspective, just makes their "job" harder.
You say that as if its a forgone fact- when it is not. I have yet to see any of these measures do more good than harm. Simple vigilance of the measures we now have in place would have been enough. Telling pilots not to surrender their planes at the slightest provocation would have worked.
The goal of terror is to disrupt, and if we fall prey to that then we are indeed serving the tero's purposes.
Nobody in his right mind would support a blank check for government authorities.
Yet isn't that what Congress did with its resolution granting Bush the right to retaliate against our attackers? They passed that resolution without knowing who there is to take action against, if we had solid evidence against them, and how we might take action.
Or, what about Ashcroft announcing those new policies about how long the INS could hold someone without accusing them of a crime? Before, the INS could only hold someone for 24 hours. Now they can hold them for 48 hours, UNLESS they decide it's an "emergency" or some such language. Then they can hold people -- who haven't been officially accused of anything -- as long as they want to.
You say nobody in his right mind would give the government a blank check to do whatever they want to. Maybe you're not familiar with our federal government...
-- dR.fuZZo
"Your post is the first I have seen stating this goal..."
The article, What Should be the Response to Violence? explains the U.S. goals in the middle east, and the entire situation.
See the headings:
There was plenty of warning.
There is in the U.S. very little attempt at understanding other cultures.
Basically, Osama bin Laden does not want the U.S. to interfere in the government of Saudi Arabia. Saudi friends who live here in the U.S. have told me that they believe that Saudi Arabia should have a democratic government. The U.S. strongly supports a dictatorship. There is evidence that the reason is corruption of the secret agencies of the U.S. government. When dealing with a dictatorship, it is easy to arrange embezzlement of U.S. government funds. With a democracy, it would be difficult.
Bush's education improvements were
I keep hearing this quote by Benjamin Franklin on talkshows and netposts:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
I live in Times Square and until September 11, 2001, I worked at 5 World Trade Center. I think about my safety a lot. And I find this quote by Benjamin Franklin to be used appallingly out of context. People are using the words of a great man to support a disgusting lack of security in the world. Completely incompatible thoughts.
If someone puts more cameras up all over Times Square, I have no problem with that. If you can't go to gun shows now and buy 10 machine guns, I have no problem with that. If you are treated as guilty first rather than innocent every time you simply try to board an airplane, like El Al, I have no problem with that.
I think the amount of FUD on the issue of our essential liberties is chokingly high on BOTH sides of the issue here.
For example, those who claim that liberty is an essential concept of our lives and it exists in a vacuum, regardless of government, supports a crock. Essential liberty is something that is hard-fought for and earned, and has been hard-fought for by generations throughout history. We don't even really have it yet in the US on many levels, but the US approaches, of all of the nations of the world, one of the closest to pure liberty, at least in its commitment to the concept. That commitment is shown by the many good citizens of slashdot here in their passionate support for liberty.
Essential liberty, like getting a driver's license, and as owning a gun should be, is something that is EARNED, not something that exists in its own right. Why do we take these rights away from inmates? Because they have proven that when given essential liberty, they use it to harm others. So it is with the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Centers. We must take away their essential liberties.
To Benjamin Franklin I say "They that can give up essential liberty to preserve civilization deserves our gratitude." His quote was said in the context of a few scrappy colonies fighting for their independence. I think Benjamin Franklin would not take kindly to his quote being used in this context, to counter the necessary alterations to society to preserve it from madmen who would destroy it by any means. These terrorists are not fighting for anyone's independence. Let us not use the words of Benjamin Franklin to preserve the amazingly lax standards that allowed terror to pull this stultifying attack off.
Wake up people. This is not an abstract discussion about a few inconveniences to our lives when our car is photographed as we run a red light on our way to 7-11 to pick up some chips. This is about tightening security to preserve civilization itself, and if a few vague concepts and inconveniences are necessary to do that, like getting fingerprinted and stared at like I were a criminal just to fly on an aircraft or rent a car or get a mailbox, then that is fine.
The American soldiers and any soldiers of the coalition that will develop to fight terrorism have given up many liberties by joining the armed forces. Do they deserve derision and condemnation on a vague conceptual level about essential liberty while they are busy preserving our civilization?
Essential liberty is not as important as civilization, it is merely a concept which becomes possible BECAUSE OF civilization, and these terrorist attacks are attacks on civilization. I won't spread my own FUD here and talk about what these terrorists will do next. Use your imagination.
But the US government will now work with unsavory characters to attack them. The executive order setting that farce up has been reversed. And most Americans now support assassination to end the lives of these terrorists. These are awful evil concepts we are willing to embrace. And we have to, to preserve concrete material civilization, not an abstract elusive concept of liberty. What do these opinions about moves against the liberty of others in other parts of the world say about the situation we find ourselves in?
For those who yawn and think the plight of Israelis and Afghanis are far away now know that they share in the plight of these peoples, more than they ever could. Think about the essential liberty of Israelis and Afghanis now, today. Think about how a fight against terror that involves a contraction of our own liberties in small ways will eventually result in a great increase in liberties for these peoples eventually. Terrorism makes clear national boundaries are useless, the entire civilized world must stand against terrorism. And it makes clear we must worry about parts of the world where essential liberties are nearly extinguished, because that threatens us in direct concrete ways, not in ephemeral vague ways.
So please, spread no more FUD about essential liberties that might be taken away from you by the American Government. Think about what the terrorists would take away from you. We will all live now as they do in Israel. And a few liberties will fade a little. And I applaud it as the necessary steps to protect us. Do I like these tightening of rights and restrictions on our lives? No. Am I rational enough to understand how they are necessary? Yes.
And when the terrorist threats fade years from now, woe to those who would extend our restrictions in order to preserve their power. Let me be the first to fight them as the demagogues they clearly would be. But that hypothetical situation is years away from the sudden terrible world we find ourselves waking up in right now. So I say get real people. We are not talking about abstract concepts here, we are talking about real-lfe cause and effect.
I want to preserve the civilized world. Let's worry about the free world later when things calm down.
So one day when the government has total control, and there is no cryptography, you will write something like "gosh I hate the president why can't he die" and the government will see that and arrest you.
When and if such a hypothetical day comes I will be there fighting right alongside you. People are missing the point: terrorism has nothing to do with defending rights. It has everything to do with defending civilization. It is not giving into fear, which would mean the terrorists win, but it has everything to do prudent preparation and defense from terrorism again.
These terrorists think we are decadent and weak and easy targets. Taking down the World Trade Centers and worried because you can't buy as many guns as you want and because your aol chat can be seen by the CIA proves that we are weak. We must be strong in the face of this terror.
People's passion for the world which existed before September 11, 2001 in words about crypto and guns is laudable.
Now let's see some passion for the world which exists now.
Everyone: less defense for individual rights from government. Everyone: more defense for the civilized world from terrorism. Everyone: the world is very different now, the stakes are higher than the old world. Adjust your opinions to the reality we live in today, not the one we lived in last week.
Terrorism wins not when our rights are temporarily constricted, but when they cause so much uncertainty our economy crumbles. Everyone's passion for liberty is wonderful! Let's see more recognition that liberty is not the point here, civilization is!
Benjamin Franklin's words applied to scrappy colonies fighting for freedom from a foreign government. His words are completely out of context from a world where civilization itself is under attack from madmen.
When we defeat these terrorists in a few years, our temporary constricting of rights here will result in a massive increase in rights, an increase from practically nothing, in areas all over the middle east, all over the world.
Listen: fighting terrorism is equivalent to exporting liberty. Our temporary constricting of rights to fight terrorists on our shores is a fraction of a percentage of liberty that will eventually be born by defeating terrorism all over the world.
We will win, and then our liberty, the liberty of peoples around the world, will be even greater than it was before!
Wake up! Adjust your opinions! ADAPT!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd been snookered. I'm rather disappointed in myself for that. So, the question then remains: In what situation is it easier to overcome a small number (3-5) of people? When they and some of the 80 other people are armed with firearms, or when they and some of the 80 other people (or even none of them) are armed with small knives at best? Flight 93 had a judo champion and a 6'5" rugby player participating in the counterattack. I'm thinking they stood a better chance unarmed against knives than they would have stood armed against guns that were drawn and ready.
One of the comments was dead on. This was a psychological problem. We'd been conditioned not to resist terrorists; frankly, because they'd never pulled anything like this before. It took, however, less than a half hour for that conditioning to reverse. We have the resistance on flight 93. We have the co-pilot of another trans-continental flight getting up and standing by the cabin door to fight off anyone who tried to break in. We've learned a hard lesson, but we've learned; and even if we do start letting knives and corkscrews and sissors on planes again, they won't be usable for a hijacking. It's very unfortunate that this wasn't figured out 30 minutes earlier, but we're creatures of habit, after all.
From the comments above:
Nos: "Security and freedom are inversely related."
Bistronaut: "Security and freedom are not inversely related!"
cybrthng: "It is inversely related."
Whan a discussion is confused, it is often because of discussing the wrong issue. It is possible to have both security and freedom if you understand the situation better:
First bombing of the World Trade Center: When followers of Osama bin Laden bombed the WTC the first time, bin Laden, a Saudi citizen, said it was because he wanted the U.S. government to stop interfering with politics in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. government (not the people, most of whom who have no idea what their government is doing) strongly supports the dictatorship there. There is evidence that the reason is corruption of some people in the secret agencies of the U.S. government. When dealing with a dictatorship, it is easy to arrange embezzlement of U.S. government funds. With a democracy, or some more representative form of government, it would be difficult.
Second bombing of the World Trade Center: bin Laden warned after the first bombing that there would be further trouble if the U.S. did not stop interfering.
The article, What Should be the Response to Violence? explains the entire situation. See the heading, "There was plenty of warning."
ALL violence is 100% reprehensible and crazy. However, it does help to understand the people who think violence is the answer.
Bush's education improvements were
Here is the bottom line:
The Bad Guys don't play by the rules, anyway.
The government has been foaming at the mouth to install things like Carnivore, implement the DMCA, stop people from having PGP, etc. for years.
Guess what? If the feds backdoor encryption sold here in the US, The Bad Guys will get their encryption elsewhere. The only people who would be effected by these limitations on privacy are people like us, not The Bad Guys.
And, as has been pointed out before, but bears repeating: if laws are made in these emotionally charged times, they will never go away, because the politicians won't want to appear "soft on terrorism" the same way they don't want to appear "soft on drugs".
Katz makes good points, and this tragedy has forever changed our world, but let's hope, as another poster said, that cooler heads prevail.
Hah, the only problem that snopes had with this particular story is that it talked about sacrifices instead of risks. The list of things that the story pointed out is factual (as far as that goes). Yes, the British didn't really make any particular effort to single out signers of the Declaration of Independence, and one man was even captured and forced to recant, but it is certainly true that these rich white men would have lived entirely different privileged lives had they not started a war with Great Britain. They knew what they were up against, and they willing risked their lives and fortunes.
In other words they put their money where their mouth was. What more can you ask from a patriot?
Their beliefs sit poorly with a generation that takes their freedom for granted, but make no mistake these people willing gambled their comfy lives in a revolutionary war simply because they felt that freedom was more important than their safety. Calling their "sacrifice" an "urban legend" turns my stomach. Sure, thousands of people who didn't sign that document also suffered and died, but that doesn't make the "sacrifices" made by the signers of the Declaration of Independence any less heroic.
Wow, and hear I was sure that Mr. Katz WAS oen of those knee jerk, overly simplistic paranoids about "privacy."
As long as we're giving quotes, there's always the oft- (and probably mis-) quoted Scott McNeally comment.
"You don't have any privacy now, deal with it."
The fact of the matter is our lives are and have been invaded by thsoe keeping records on what we do and what happens to us long before the internet. They're called "credit beaurues" and "underwriting departments."
For all the paranoia I've sene over net-autonomy I've yet to see anyone hurt by its compromise. (The same CANNOT be said abotu the compromise of fiscal and health informatio nanonymity which urts peopel daily.)
To quote the Jay and Bob movie "Thats what the internet is, someplace where you can slander others anonymously." But is this REALLY our best hopes for what this medoium means to us???
The United States did, however, once, suspend the Constitution during the Civil War. The rest of the time they just try and squeeze new laws past it.
Liberty in your lifetime
Interesting ideas but at the end of the day pointless. As people in the UK have known for years having a bunch of nutters in a terrorist organisation being funded by sympathisers abroad (in this case mainly based in the US) doesn't mean that you capitulate and turn into a police state. Intelligence is key, both miltary and political, the art of negotiation and the attempt to remove the problem by political means will be far more successful in the long run. In the short term it hasn't helped having had the political wing of the IRA being allowed to raise funds in the US to support the supporters of terrorism.
Part of the solution, probably the biggest part is working with those people who _peacefully_ oppose these regimes and seek to create a democratic world. The policy of the west (especially the US) during the 70s and 80s was to fund anyone who opposed the Soviets, the the middle east these were Islamic fundamentalists such as the Taliban, not democratic organisations seeking a better system.
Cracking down on privacy, bombing countries are neither real short term or long term solutions. Having 3 billion people living on $2 a day, and 1 billion on $1 a day is. And the continual funding of dictatorial and vicious regimes by the west for their own ends has to stop. When the Iran v Iraq conflict was on the west backed, and supplied arms to, Iraq. When the Soviets invaded Afganistan we armed the Taliban.
There are serious questions to be answered, mainly by the politicians whose actions have led us into the world we find ourselves, it wasn't politicians who died on Sept 11th it was innocent people who died, people who had never supplied arms to Iraq, funded dictatorial regimes and if asked would have said "Hell no" to such suggestions. But thanks to the defense and other big businesses our world is not governed by the poor people classed as "colateral damage" by politicans and soldiers but by greed and monopolistic desire.
Ghandi once said that any act however good, which was achieved by violence had sown the seeds of its own destruction.
It is time to talk, to support those who DEMOCRATICALLY oppose regimes, not to support another bunch of fanatical nutters who just happen to be slightly less worse, at the moment, than the nutters we armed last week.
Politicians are scum, the George Bushes have created this world, but it will never be they who have to pay for their actions.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I conject that most of the people surveyed would not want envelopes outlawed, or snail mails opened at random. This is the same idea.
Since envelopes are still legal, terrorists could use mail. In fact, they could encrypt the letters they send in the mail with PGP. Key escrow isn't going to do much good.
In '93, the blind cleric's rabid maniacal followers tried to blow up the WTC with a truck bomb. The attempt failed.
Bin Laden's ideological compatriots tried to blow up LAX on New Year's Eve, 1999. They were thwarted.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED since the 11th except for the cold knowledge that they got through. They hit us, and all the security teams and crypto backdoors and suspension of Posse Comitatus laws and a general agreement not to criticize the President or Ashcroft "at this time" would have stopped them from finding simple, simple ways of turning something normal into a weapon of horror.
NOW all of a sudden, our society is too free, we don't give the police enough power, we aren't safe.
Boys and girls, we were NEVER SAFE. We never have been, we never will be. What we are is unused to the real world as it is experienced by the majority of the world's peoples. We've grown up in Yogi Bear's Perfect Place, a land of suburban blandness and freedom, where the worst thing possible is mayhap a poor family lowering the neighborhood's property values. My point is, most of the people panicking have never had their complacency shattered.
I grew up in a neighborhood where you could watch someone stabbed dying outside of a taco restaurant, or in one case, outside my school on a stretcher. I've been robbed at gunpoint three times. I've been beaten savagely twice by ignorant hicks. I know in my bones that the world is not a safe, pink place to live.
I can live with danger. I also understand risk analysis, which says I've a better chance of getting killed in my car tomorrow than being killed by a religious cult from the Middle East/Central Asia.
What I can't live with is the certain knowledge that my panicked, hysterical, jingoistic, SCARED countrymen are about to give Ashcroft, who believes dancing is a vile tool of Satan, who believes Americans have no right to privacy, and I deeply suspect, believes the Internet is the vilest tool of Satan possible, the power to transform my country into a giant paternalistic prison camp, in the name of security.
The CIA and the FBI have all the tools they need to track terrorists. They WERE tracking the terrorists!! They just didn't expect the men to move simultaneously and attack... tho there is now sme reporting that states that they WERE told, and didn't listen.
Suspension of Habeus Corpus during wartime is perfectly OK. But only during. The trouble with giving up a freedom is that once gone, it never comes back. I'm hearing Ashcroft wants to seize assets without trial, hold people indefinitely without charge, monitor the use of everyone on the net, and oh yes, supports the DMCA and it's successor laws to the max. Encryption is OK if you're a corporation, just not for individuals.
Hawks of national security, just like cops, Secret Service agents, or bodyguards, never feel that their job is done until basically their clients are locked up in nice, safe walls where no one can hurt them.
We can let them shut down the internet as we know it. They will. And let them censor; they will. We can let them issue us smartID cards for our lifelong use. We can let them fucking tattoo us, all for our collective safety and security.
And you know what? In four years, they blow up the Holland Tunnel with high explosives in Chevy van, killing thousands. Or something similar.
There is NEVER security. Only national insecurity. Bin Laden has done what no "communist" could. He has gauged our ignorance of our own traditions. Remember years ago when someone conducted a survey, proposing the Bill of Rights to passers-by on a U.S. street? The majority not only did not recognize the BOR, they disagreed with them and voted them down!!
We are also a people, a country that cannot intelligently analyze risk; he knew that too. People are so afraid to fly that the airlines are dying. And there is not a chance in hell that terrorists are on board now; the trick wouldn't even work again -- the passengers would kill the terrorists before they finished walking down the aisles.
Bin Laden and his fellow cultists have managed what the Anarchists and the sad revolutionary communist party nimrods could never do. He has made us blow our own heads off. We are shutting down not only privacy, but the very debate on the subject itself. I heard a securty wonk on loan from the admin on National Public Radio the other day, stating blandly that we would need face recognition systems, smartCards for a national people-tracking system, cell phones that GPS the ID and location of every American at all times, and PCs mandated to have tracking devices on them. And the interviewer, on a nominally intellectual network, DIDN'T EVEN ARGUE -- HE AGREED. Not a peep. Fear disables all brain functions.
The men on horseback wasted no time. Within 24 hours of the attack, they were proposing and passing laws, working the talk shows, seeding fear and confusion. And it worked. Even Katz buys it.
ID cards, logged traffic on the net, tracer chips in our asses -- none of this would have stopped an attack! It just shuts US down! We lose everything we ever dreamed of for over 225 years because we panicked and wanted daddy to save us!
Daddy can't save us. He wants to, but all he'll do is lock us in the house and refuse to let us play with "dangerous" toys.
And they will keep killing us, all the mighty legions of what? a few hundred? a few thousand? members of a sociopathic, hate-filled, STUPID cult. They will change us into huddled, terrified children because a handful of men, some box cutters, plasic cutlery, and a surprise plan caught us by surprise. But not by much.
They will kill us until we remove their cancerous presence from the planet. But we won't do a thing to them by turning into a gulag.
You can't make this stuff up.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
No. We expect it because we have been cut off from the real world for centuries.
You can't "deter" people who are trying to commit suicide and murder in the name of God. Execution, torture, slaughter of their families -- nothing works.
You can only kill them.
There is an anecdote about Subj.
;-).
During the course of History, five Jews said the world what is the foundation of everything.
The first one said that everything is in the head. It was Moses.
Second one told that everything is in the heart. It was Jesus.
Third on said that everything is in the wallet (or stomach). It was Marx.
Fourth one said that everything is in sex. It was Freud.
And Einstein said that everything is relative
I cite this anecdote just to point that your opinion is totally Marxist, and the History has proven it wrong.
You might build thousands of schools, but if the teachers are from Islamic Jihad, you're going to get fanatics at the graduation. Taliban is the byproduct of the schools built by Pakistanis in the camps of Afghan refugees.
There is no easy way (short of taking children from their parents and moving them out of the country for brainwashing with "American values") of transforming rugged fighters' children into socialites or law-obedient citizens like you and me.
Also read jordandeamattson's reply - I second every word of it. The only thing I want to add is that Israel SYMBOLIZES West's penetration into Islamic world. This is why they hate it. And removing Israel won't do any good because Islamists will just find another symbol/target.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
The CIA has assassinated a number of political leaders, including democratically elected presidents. Those actions would doubtlessly be called "terrorism" if the victims were Americans. Does that mean you need to bomb Washington to rid the world of terrorism?
The IRA has recently been training FARC terrorists in Columbia. The IRA is funded by American organisations like the IFC. Does that mean America is sponsoring terrorism in Columbia too? Wow, it's starting to look like one of those world wide terrorist networks I keep hearing about - and Americans are bankrolling it.
In reality, of course, it's not a global terror network. It's simply a bunch of violent, power-hungry organisations funded by naive individuals who are fooled by stirring words such as "patriotism", "history", "identity" and "freedom". I'm afraid your government is just another one of those organisations, and you are just another one of those fools.
A moderator just moderated my above post as a "troll". Why? I'm posting directly on topic, using logic, and not bringing in any inflammatory issues. This moderation is preposterous.
-Billy