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Do Privacy Fears Allow Terrorism?
carbon3C writes "Privacy advocates are luddites, says Heather MacDonald, a lawyer at the Manhattan Institute. She says we should shut up and let the government do what it wants. Our government only wants to protect us, and would never misuse technology. How do we send a clear message that non-luddites (conservative and liberal) are concerned about privacy precisely because we do know so much about technology?" Leaving your front door wide open is a great idea, until someone you don't know walks through it.
Do what those guys did to Poindexter - collect all available information about this woman, and post it on a web site.
Something similar happened to the Minister in charge of this kind of stuff in the UK. It's a good eye-opener for them, although I would hold back on posting it on a public web site. The Mr Mature option is to send it to them personally and tell them to imagine what it would be like if it got posted publicly...
In one attempt to undermine the weapons inspection process, it was revealed that Harvey McGeorge of UNMOVIC had "a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs."
Like, so what. Some people do that. It's his private life, it has nothing at all whatsoever to do with his ability to do his job as a weapons inspector. And yet, the only possible reason for publishing that information was to diminish him in the eyes of the public, to try to reduce the credibility of the inspection process as a whole.
Does anybody think their own or anybody else's private lives won't be vulnerable to such abuses?
(More details on this can be found here.)
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To the argument that governments will not abuse powers given to fight terrorism, I give the following. On April 22nd, there was an anti-war protest at RAF Fairford in the UK. The organisers arranged a coach to transport speakers from london. The police used their recently acquired post sept-11th powers (acquired despite protest from the civil-liberties lobby) to stop the coach and search it. Having succesfully found marker pens (magic markers) in the coach, they were able to turn the coach around, take everyone back to London and arrest them all for 'going equipped to breach the peace'. The markers could clearly have been used vandalise as well as to make the banners that were on the coach. One anti-war protest succesfully neutered.
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David Blunket is blind.
Thats not the point atall. A lot of invasions have occured in history and a lot of countries have trying to stop the others from doing so. My point here is, see how this turned out. The U.S., after they made us of them, left them high&dry! As long as their work is done they dont mind sacrifising the lives of thousands of non-americans. It is absolute disregard for humanity. The fact that the CIA trained the most wanted man on earth, who was once with them and now against them say a lot about the dirty dealing of the US govt. I dont know what it is, and i'm not saying it is justified, but there sure must be some logic to why Osama and thousands of others who were with the CIA turned so against the Americans, to have such hatred. Clearly, the US has time and again misused its status of the superpower and today even the most-neutral nations hate it for doing that. The US govt. has done a lot of harm to its credibility over the past decades, and the George Bush govt. might just go down in history for putting the last straw on the camels back! Why dont we start building schools and hospitals instead of bombs and missiles. Why cant we have progree of humanity instead of its destruction? (wonder what darwin would say if he saw this big picture). America being the economic superpower should lead the way for the others to do so. But its doing just the opposite.
Maybe it's because it's 8 am and I haven't slept, or maybe it's just that when someone says something this ignorant it enrages me. I mean, it's intolerable that this statement even needs to be shot down. Read a book you stupid bitch.
Even the most complacent, oblivious, and trusting of Americans in this day and age, should be resigned to the fact that a conspiracy of good intentions can often lead to abuse of government power.
Say that again: anti-prohibition (not pro-drug). It's important to understand.
Why are the Libertarians against prohibition? It's really quite simple: Drug prohibition causes violent crime (from the resulting black market), corruption in law enforcement, wastes ridiculous amounts of tax money, and above all, removes the element of personal liberty -- and hence personal responsibility -- from the individual and puts it on "society".
In a nutshell, drug prohibition causes much, much worse problems than the problems it was intended to solve. See the "issues" section of lp.org for more info.
I don't necessarily agree with the woman or
the idea of TIA but I feel that both the Slashdot
summary, and the Wired Article mis-represented
what she was saying. The actual quote was:
"If you don't trust government to protect
us from terrorists, good luck doing it
yourself," MacDonald said.
Here is the story from news.com which I feel
was more accurate (fair?).
===
The Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, being developed by the U.S. Defense Department, is an example of using the latest technology to guard against future terrorist attacks, representatives of two conservative groups said during a debate at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference. If fully implemented, TIA would link databases from sources such as credit card companies, medical insurers and motor vehicle agencies in hopes of identifying terrorist activities.
Heather MacDonald, a lawyer and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, dismissed criticism of TIA as "hysterical vociferous cries" from privacy advocates who oppose making government more efficient at snaring wrongdoers and protecting innocent Americans. "If you don't trust government to protect us from terrorists, good luck doing it yourself," MacDonald said.
"We have to use every legal mechanism in our power to make sure we don't have a 9-11 type of attack," MacDonald said. She accused her opponents of taking "a Luddite approach that says al-Qaida can get its hands on the best possible technology to attack us, but we're stuck with (an) outdated mechanism."
Over the last few months, TIA has become a lightning rod for criticism, with Republican and Democratic legislators speaking out against it on privacy and security grounds. On Feb. 20, as part of a large spending bill for the federal government, Congress approved additional scrutiny of research and development on the TIA project.
Those restrictions do not halt TIA research. They would permit dozens of grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to be fully funded if DARPA sends Congress a "schedule for proposed research and development" that includes a privacy evaluation, or if President George W. Bush certifies that TIA is necessary for national security.
During Wednesday's debate, opponents of TIA characterized the system as unacceptable, unworkable, and liable to be abused by people with access to it. It's a "sharp departure from the long-standing principle that you have the right to be left alone," said Katie Corrigan, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Corrigan said it was difficult to debate TIA because it remained an "amorphous and to date very secret concept" that the Bush administration has not discussed in any detail.
MacDonald, from the Manhattan Institute, said critics were guilty of "knee-jerk opposition" and spreading "patent falsehoods" about how the system would work if implemented.
Michael Scardaville, a homeland security analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said: "Can it be abused? Yes. Is that what DARPA is trying to do? Absolutely not...It is not the Orwellian monster described by many critics."
Noam Chomsky liked the Khmer Rouge's actions in Cambodia.
"If a serious study?is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered?that the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response?because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.? Such a study, however, has yet to be undertaken." That was written in 1979.
In 1977 he wrote "...analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent..."
She looks fairly young judging by her photograph. I wonder if she's ever read about COINTELPRO, as just one example of government snooping gone too far.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
A quick look over some other articles of hers pull out choice quotes such as:
Apparently she's a contributing editor at the
Manhattan Institute's City Journal. And the M.I. is a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization, so maybe a donor list is available.
Some more choice info on the M.I.:
Nice.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Imagine if they actually prosecuted people for that! Silly pedestrians, always getting in the way...
There are states where the pedestrian does not have the right of way. I believe Nevada is one of them.
If the car has the right of way and it hits a pedestrian, the pedestrian is at fault. No vehicular manslaughter.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
1) Great pyramids of Egypt (paid for by the blood of thousands of conscripts)
2) The Holocaust
3) Detention of the Japanese during WWII
4) McCarthyism
5) Detention of arabs today
6) Watergate
7) Radiation testing on US troops
8) Waco
9) The Internal Revenue Service
10) Project MK-Ultra
Anyone else care to contribute?
But he's backing up his assertions with outside, third party sources. All anonymous. Hmm...
Trust factor: zero. Probablility of this guy trying to make a buck off of a controversial subject: very good.
Post a link suggesting that this guy was anything but a profiteer, trying to make a buck by bringing down a target that many others wanted to see fall. Go ahead - the Googlewashing of "Fortunate Son" made it practically impossible for me to find out anything about the book or him, other than the vast collection of people I group with the "Michael Moore" hyper-anti-conservative croud.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
As you suggest, the political spectrum doesn't have just a single axis. In fact, there are a several websites out there with multi-axis political scales. Here is a very good one and a much more slanted one (it takes Capitalism for granted).
Another issue you allude to is how the meanings of some words have changed over time. For example, the word "socialism" has been horribly distorted from it's original meaning. "Anarchist" also has a lot of baggage attached to it. Our political debate is horribly weakened by this distortion of language.
Ah well.... "War is Peace" after all.
If you don't have a lawyer, or have a poor one, then you might as well go ahead and turn your pockets inside out, hand them your belt and shoelaces, and get fitted for a nice orange jumpsuit that has "Dept of Corrections" stenciled on the back.
Yeah, right.