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Bruce Sterling On Total Information Awareness
securitas writes "Declan McCullagh interviews Bruce Sterling about Total Information Awareness (renamed Terrorist Information Awareness and raising concerns) or 'Poindexter's nutty scheme' as Sterling thinks of it. He predicts TIA will destabilize the government and lead to internal KGB-style coups. Whether you agree with him or not it makes for thought-provoking reading."
I actually prefer Tits And Tushy myself.
Well.... not to pick nits, but...
Bill Clinton was not convicted by the Senate. He still was impeached.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
Thanks for the facts, Dave. But um... I didn't say anything about Clinton. I've found it's better to talk about religon and politics, then Clinton.
ok, why did what happend on Sept. 11th not happen on Nov. 9th? There are/were arguably just as many references to non-ISO dates (when the attack took place) as there were to non-ISO dates...
So I ask the question again, why Sept. 11 and not Nov 9th? if what was intended was psychological terror, why not have made the attack on Nov. 9th and compound the attack with bitter cold?
It was only up until very recently that the US has been using YYYYMMDD formats, most notably with the whole Y2K fiasco.. prior to that, 09-11-01 might very well be interpreted by many systems as november 9th. Actually in a lot of the world, 9/11 MEANS november 9th as not everyone uses ISO standard dates (and nor does a lot of our current documents like RFCs, ahem.)
Think that logic through a tad, you'll see what I mean.
Ok so to sum this up, you think what happened on Sept 11th was coincidentally on a day which the public at large could associate with an emergency number, and that it (being the actual date 9/11) was not MEANT to be part of their attack? You think they chose the date at random?
Listen, just because (with all due respect) you sir do not believe 9/11 happened on that particular day because of the arrangement of the number of the date does not mean that it happened on that particular day for no particular reason. IMHO, what happened on 9/11 happened that day in order to associate that day's events with what North Americans generally consider as being "emergency", or "crisis".. to think otherwise would mean you agree with my argument that if the attack were really meant to inflict harm on the people of the United States of America (and not just to inflict psychological terror), then the attack "should" have occured during a harsher time of the year.. so now that beggs yet another question, did our attackers have some kind of twisted "mercy" on us to chose a more mild time of the year when it would be ever-so-slightly less chaotic to recover?
Let's see . . . where to begin?
Point 1: Saddam Hussein was a despot. He and his flunkies deserved what they got. Iraq also includes the civilian population, and that population has suffered at our hands: first due to years of economic sanctions, intermittent warfare (Clinton bombed them, too), then a much larger war in which indeterminate numbers of civilians were killed or wounded, and many more than that left without reliable supplies of clean water, electricity, or food.
Point 2: President Bush did not choose to make Hussein's despotism the justification for war. He and his advisors chose to make Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction in contravention of UN resolutions the justification for war. They made persistent, clear, and unambiguous claims that Hussein possessed these weapons, and that they had proof of it.
So we went to war. Roughly a hundred Americans died, thousands of enemy combatants, and indeterminate numbers of civilians, both due to direct military involvement (ie they got bombed or shot) and due to indirect secondary effects (ie getting diarrhea from drinking unclean water after Baghdad's infrastructure was destroyed -- in an environment as hot as Iraq, with no reliable clean water, it's really damn easy to shit yourself to death if you get the runs).
Now. All that is one hell of a lot of death. And the WMD's that were the justification for all this death do not seem to be there. We have found two -- count 'em -- mobile trailers that might conceivably have been used to make biological or chemical agents for use in WMD's. That's it. The weapons aren't there now, and weren't there then.
If Bush wanted to go to war because Hussein was a despot, he should have said so! But he didn't. He chose to lie to his people and the world. That lie led to thousands of deaths, destablized an entire region, and pissed off our allies. I don't know about you, but I am pretty damn angry about it. War should never, ever be fought without a clear, unambiguous and truthful reason.
Is that so much to ask?
SF is a genre. It has it's own publishing houses/subdivisions, it's own bookstore networks, it's own magazines. SF works have their own section in most major libraries. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a ghetto thing, but there's a clear delineation and there has been for decades. It's a genere, just like 'westerns' and 'harlequin romance' and 'mystery.'
And it has to be, because, sadly, none of those 'genere' subcultures of literature stand on their own as mainstream fiction. There are great SF and Western and Mystery writers, but they're the exception. It's like O. Henry's writing. The term for it is 'commercial stories' and there's been a market for that kind of thing for over a century and a half now.