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Stupid Censorship, Stupid Security
The
2003 Jefferson Muzzle
"winners" are out. This year's crop starts with John Ashcroft and the U.S. Congress, and works its way down through the school board that voted to put Harry Potter on the restricted shelf. Innovation in censorship deserves recognition, read and enjoy. And in other stupid news,
the winners of the
Stupid Security Competition
have been announced. I like that I'm being protected from tea. It makes me feel safe.
...is actually very good, espesially with a teaspoon of honey.
Having read thru a lot of the article, I must say that there is one thing that strikes me; the 'security measures' seems to have been dreamt up by someone in an office, written down by someone who's mind is on other things, and implied by people without the faintest idea of what the first person really meant.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
The Censor sits
Somewhere between
The scenes to be seen
And the television sets
With his scissor purpose poised
Watching the human stuff
That will sizzle through
The magic wires
And light up
Like welding shops
The ho-hum rooms of America
And with a kindergarten
Arts and crafts concept
Of moral responsibility
Snips out
The rough talk
The unpopular opinion
Or anything with teeth
And renders
A pattern of ideas
Full of holes
A doily
For your mind
Mason Williams
The Mason Williams Reading Matter, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1964
FreeSpeech.org
Here is the reason why, in case you were a former censorware.org reader.
My school's filter has blocked the Muzzle Awards under the category of "Pornographic and Recreational Nudity"! -Joe
Reminds me of when the head of department is determined to go on a search-and-delete operation for anything that might be potentially offensive. The first students hear about this is when they log in and read the message of the day. The first reaction: "Some ******'s gone and deleted my thesis on sexually explicit lyrics in rap music!".
What if i'm a parent in Alabama in the 50's? What if i find the idea of integration objectionable? What if i find the idea of queer mariage objectionable? What if i see all works that do not exist to exhibit the glory of God objectionable?
I guess i have a right to make sure none of these things exist in the public sphere. It's not censorship, it's protecting my children.
Me? If I can't drive there, I don't go.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions...
:) The rest of the quote reads: ...All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. -George Bernard Shaw
Didn't say it was it was a very good purpose...
Amen.
On a similar note, I'd like to cite the Bill of No Rights, Article II:
You do not have the right to never be offended. This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone - not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc., but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.
=Smidge=
Oh, I'm afraid that you are gravely mistaken!
:-)
The Johns Hopkins University here in Baltimore, MD views itself as a potential "soft target" for terrorists, due to its being a high-profile educational institution.
Since February, Hopkins has had a van parked in front of 34th street to keep terrorists from blowing up the freshman dorms with a car bomb.
Presumably this was done to pre-emptively quell the fears of parents who might think JHU wasn't doing enough to keep their kids safe. Nevermind that the side streets allow terrorists equal access to the dorms, that the freshman dorms probably aren't high on Osama's list of Baltimore targets, and that the number of people in the world who knew Hopkins was anything but a hospital can be counted on one hand.
Otherwise a harmless gesture of stupidity, aside from the fact that 34th Street is a free parking zone with about 20 spaces. Its closing has created a major parking shortage in the entire University area. For those of us that actually have to deal with it on a daily basis, this is more than just whining- this is a true inconvenience.
Stupid.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
While the baby milk incident at an airport is well known I feel other airport incidents deserve honorable mention as well.
Like... The decorated World War Two veteran who was told he would not be able to take his Medal of Honor on the plane due to the pin on it. There was also a small pen knife with the set. When he asked if they could mail it to him he was told no. When he asked what would be done with it he was it would "probably be thrown away."
And here's one you see on the news now and then but never, ever makes the news in the way it should... Someone gets through security at an airport terminal in a way they should not. No one ever thinks of using the video cameras all over the airport to track them down, to see if they did anything suspicious. Oh no. Much easier to empty the entire terminal out so that everyone who was spread out all over the terminal is now crowded into the street and sidewalk in front of the terminal.
None of the people doing security ever seem to think of the great risk this exposes those people to when they are forced to congregate in an open area much more tightly packed than they had been in the terminal. None of the security personnel have ever considered that this might be an excellent way to initiate a terrorist attack.
(DISCLAIMER - Any terrorist with half a brain has probably thought of these or variations thereof so my discussing them here is not giving them any ideas. Maybe this will cause some security person who stumbles on this to start thinking seriously about how stupid this "empty the terminal to secure it" policy is.)
Recipie for Mass casualties:
Precipitate an incident at an airport terminal that you know will cause the security personnel to herd all of the people in the terminal outside where they are easy to get at and densely packed to boot. (If you pay any attention to the world at all you must have seen scenes like this on your TV when such an overreaction occurs locally.)
Possibilities to cause mass casualties include:
Set off a car bomb. Set off several if you can manage it. Can't park one? Well drive one into the crowd and detonate it. Couple of guys in security uniforms telling you that "You can't drive your car in there?" Shoot them and drive where you like.
Fire on the crowd with automatic weapons. Two or three people with assault rifles could cause hundreds of casualties in under a minute given the rate of fire of the weapons and the density of the targets. Full metal jacketed rounds can even penetrate one target and enter and possibly penetrate another multiplying the effectiveness of the attack. If a belt-fed weapon can be used that's even better. No need to stop and reload and probably a higher cyclic rate that will yield even better results.
Rocket-propelled grenade launcher into.. you guessed it... the crowd. Can even be mixed in along with the automatic weapons fire.
Chemicals. Whether these are chemical weapons specifically or simply highly poisonous or corrosive laboratory supplies, great effectiveness is possible. Combine with explosives or automatic weapons fire for improved results.
I'm sure there are other possibilities but the above and combinations of the above would be quite effective in achieving mass casualties. Why would any terrorist need to look further when so many simple but effective and quite realistically doable ways spring to mind.
Hopefully some airport security personnel will see this and bring it to the attention of someone with enough insight to see that the old "Herd them out" routine is not really sensible these days.
Others because they just don't care.
I looked through the Jefferson Muzzles an the one thing that struck me was that the damn things keep repeating. Its the same things that have been going on for ever before the awards for started.
The scenario is always the same some small or petty elected/appointed official decides what the hell I am going to do this anyway. Its not that they don't know whats gone before. Its not that they don't understand. Theyre just assholes and theres no good way to make certain that the pain they cause others gets back to them in a timely fashion.
It's not just government, its any organization that thinks its managed to achieve a level of insulation. You can put in your favorite (Phone Co., Power Co., Cable Co. (often the best purchase a political contribution can buy), Microsoft, legacy app vendor ).
The fact of any security measure being not 100% effective is the critical one, and completely vitiates most procedures. You may be able to rationalize a scenario that explains a procedure. But the low occurance of the feared scenario, coupled with the imperfections often make the system with the new procedure work worse than the old.
Since terrorism happens so infrequently, we can't tell if terrorist acts have decreased, increased, or stayed the same since any new tightened procedures have been implemented, or even since 9/11/01. Looking at it the other from the other side, more arduous security measures are a definite good for those who are paid to implement them, and we should be suspicious that their $100000/unit, less than perfect security system isn't truly any more effective than rolling dice.
As an example, suppose 1 person in 1000000 tries to smuggle a bomb detectable by those ion scanners in airports, and those scanners have a 95% detection rate and a 1% false alarm rate. With 200 million passengers/month (http://www.atwonline.com/stats_top25.cfm), 10 bombs will be completely undetected, the device will trigger 2000190 times, causing the screenings to be useless 99.9905% of the time, and hoping that the further screening will pick up the 0.01%. Maybe the time and effort doing the useless screenings would be better as guard service on the flights, or on combat training for the crew.
You can juke around with the numbers some, but there's always a tradeoff between the sensitivity and the false alarm rate of any test.
Terrorist acts are so low frequency, that using an imperfect system to counteract them is a waste of money and effort. Gains that you would expect from a system are mostly lost in the wasted effort in false alarms, and the effort might be better directed elsewhere.
Me? I want to carry my Visor Edge stylus on the plane so I can poke the eye of a box-toting hijacker, like brave Swiss Army penknife, fingernail clipper, and knitting needle toting passengers on flight 93. Rationalizing useless security procedures is counterproductive.
I think the thing with disposeable lighters being allowed and refillable ones not is that you could fill the lighter with something other than lighter fuel, but it's still stupid because they let you on with bottled drinks even if they're opened already.
graspee
I am Canadian, and live in Toronto. I used to sail over to the US to visit their friendly towns, but I stopped a few years ago because of their weird customs rules. If they decide your I68 form is not in order, your boat will be impounded. Due to their zero-tolerance drug laws, if an immigration officer decides that there is even one speck of marijuana on your boat, your boat will be impounded. I am NOT a pot user, btw.
This is a disturbing trend I heard more and more often during the Drug War (which continues to rage unabated), but especially since 9/11- people from countries like Canada and Great Britain are cancelling trips to the U.S. because they are scared to come here. With all the loud and apologetic rhetoric about how "rights are only for citizens" (which any lawyer can tell you is bullshit), can you blame them? If I weren't a U.S. citizen I'd be nervous to come here too given the scary shit I've been seeing enter the conventional wisdom. I've never seen a level of nationalism and xenophobia like I'm seeing now.
This country likes to shoot its collective mouth off about its "freedoms", and it slathers the words "freedom" and "liberty" through its propaganda. Just look at the obnoxious names we give to things like Operation Iraqi Freedom. Even a few years ago it would have gotten a sensible name like Operation Desert Storm or Operation Desert Fox. Our naming of military operations has become perfused with propaganda- Operation Restore Hope, and now Operation Iraqi Freedom which just sounds creepily dishonest. We have made no secret of the fact that these are freedoms for us, not for you in the rest of the world. And while we like the idea of democracy taking root in foreign lands, it better not get in the way of cheap gas here or something has to be done about it. We have no problems with our government undermining or overthrowing democratically elected governments, or propping up repressive regimes. That stuff happens in countries we know or care nothing about and 90% of us couldn't place them on a map to save our lives anyway.
Except that the freedom that Americans lecture the world about is really like the royalty in Britain- sort of there for show, functioning as a crowd-pleaser, but with no solid or meaningful foundation underneath it. The Queen has meaningless rights that have mere ceremonial value, and as an American citizen, so do you! The reaction to one day of hijackings has revealed that much. When it comes time to put up or shut up, and actually honor these inalienable rights that we brag about, we're really clever at coming up with various excuses for denying them. Ironically, we often do this by dreaming up new contervailing powers for the state, phrased as if they're rights enjoyed by individuals- like the "right not to be killed in a terrorist attack" or the "right to protect our flag from desecration". The British may be a little pretentious with their own cultural fiction, but at least they're not as hypocritical.
This "freedom fries" talk can't be helping, either. Here it's just funny, but I just can't believe that nobody overseas is hearing the words "freedom fries" and questioning the wisdom of their investments here.
Americans are stupidly digging their own grave. If it means they might never have to start an uncomfortable conversation with their children about pot, the idiots will watch contentedly as thousands of people's lives are ruined in prison and Canadians (i.e. foreigners) have their boats confiscated with no due process. Then when the country has succeeded in scaring all foreign investment away and sinks into a depression, we'll just pin the blame on France (or whatever other representative of the civilized world has gotten in our way most recently). We're so wonderful, that if the world thinks we've lost our minds, it must be someone else's fault.
You are a few decades late. The police already could do this before the "RAVE" act.
Here in the US, the police can do anything they want. The criminals can do anything they want. The politians can do anything they want. The corporations can do anything they want. But the common people aren't allowed to live their lives. Plus they get the added bonus of working their lives away for nothing, having everything stolen from them, and being arrested for crimes they didn't commit.
Funny, I thought this country's ideals were the exact opposite.