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FBI Planning New Net-Tapping Push
Section_Ei8ht writes to tell us CNet is reporting that the FBI is pushing for legislation to allow law enforcement officials free access to networking gear via built in backdoors for eavesdropping. From the article: "Jim Harper, a policy analyst at the free-market Cato Institute and member of a Homeland Security advisory board, said the proposal would 'have a negative impact on Internet users' privacy. People expect their information to be private unless the government meets certain legal standards,' Harper said. 'Right now the Department of Justice is pushing the wrong way on all this.'"
make me wonder why we just don't encrypt the entire network ? I understand there would be more over-head, but wouldn't that be the same as games pushing hardware?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
I also don't agree with the provision that says that law enforcement officials would not have to publish a yearly "notice of the actual number of communications interceptions." Keeping this information private would not help their investigations. What difference does it make to a terrorist whether the FBI intercepted 12,000 or 120,000 communiques.
Isn't this the same thing that was said when the government wanted phone taps and access to your bank accounts ? Not to mention any national database.. no chance there of someone abusing it ?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
There are many ways to implement court-ordered wiretapping. The CALEA debate is not about whether IP networks should be wiretappable but about how it should be done and who should pay for it. Before CALEA, the FBI had to install Carnivore sniffing equipment at ISPs. I guess they think that's too much work, so they want every router at every ISP to be upgraded to have built-in wiretapping, so they don't have to lug any equipment around. And they want the ISPs to pay for these upgrades. And according to the article, now they want the ISPs to also filter the traffic for them, so they get only the traffic they want.
IMO this is an expensive, complex, failure-prone solution to the problem.
...it's the equivalent of giving the local police a copy of your house keys. It could and would be abused by some dirty coppers, their partners in crime or anyone who can get access to them. Would you trust the police to keep your house safe? Do you trust the FBI to keep your network safe?
Reading this makes the thought police from George Orwell's 1984 come to mind.
The problem with this kind of idea is that it is very difficult to implement without also giving hordes of unauthorized people access. Also, to address your argument, while with a warrant the police can get access to your house, there isn't a law mandating every lock to be pickable or easily opened by them, and I don't see why that should be different for network equipment.
If they get a warrant, then they can have a judge legally compel me to give them access. This is just like granting them access to certain buildings.
I know you will hate me for this, but the objection to the proposed system isn't confined to the stated means and justifications of the proposal. The system as it stands has a very high level of accountability and control. If you create facilities that bypass the courts, then the controls and accountability for how these facilities are (mis)used disappears.
Businessmen and officials and regular people commit crimes all of the time because (and this is usually a whiner DA/cop reason) under legal presumption of innocence, if the process of producing a prima facie case in court is significanlty less than the effort it takes to investigate then the law will have no deterrent effect against criminals. Therefore, even though this seems to improve investigation, prosecution, and therefore deterrence, it actually makes it easier for many more shady people to victimize many more regular people without a trail of evidence or fear of legal retribution.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
If, like you say, you have "nothing to hide", then you also shouldn't have any problem posting all that information right here, right now. You also shouldn't have any issue with including your name, address, phone number, driver's license number, social security number, bank account numbers, and medical records. If you have kids, you shouldn't have any problem posting their names, pictures of them, where they go to school, and their daily schedules.
And I absolutely disagree with your assertion that people who value privacy are "terrorists". By your logic, many of the Founding Fathers are terrorists who "wish to strip people of their freedom".
I don't think so. . .
Good metaphor, but I think this would be more like them demanding the key to every door in America be placed in an unlocked box right beside the door, with a label saying "please don't open this box if you're not a cop."
With the way warrants work now, abuse is fairly hard, at least at the individual level. Some pissed off or nosy cop or FBI agent can't simply search your house or tap your net connection and so on. If the cop shows up at an ISP with the tap equipment, and so warrant, it's not likely he'll get it in there and it's pretty likely he'll get caught. Same idea as if you come home, and there's a cop rifling through your shit. You ask for a warrant and one isn't forthcomming, he's in a lot of trouble.
Well the problem here is that this can all be activated remotely, silently. A similar idea would be for the government to put cameras in your home. I have a feeling nearly everyone would object to this, regardless of the justification. The problem is that with something like this, an individual can spy on you at random, with almost no accountability. They just turn tapping on and go. There's no oversight.
Between the cost and the abuse potential, I can't possibly see this as a good thing. All power you give the government has potential for abuse, and you need to weigh that against what it gets you. This gets them nothing but convenience, they already have the legal authority to tap connections and such, and opens up huge potential for abuse. Thus it should not be allowed. The cost argument just makes it that much more compelling. It is not the burden of private businesses/citizens to bear this cost.
I also find all this extremely uncompelling because our existing crime fighting tools appear to be working. Violent crime in the US keeps going down. I don't think we'll ever eliminate it, but it looks like we are moving in the right direction, it looks like we ARE able to fight it. Thus I'm not seeing the need for this vastly expanded government power.
For now. See, after a while, sometimes years, the power of magic incantations fades, and new ones need to be found. The last big one was "communist", and that held sway over us for nearly forty years. It remains to be seen what word or words will next be used to invoke the political spirits, but I expect they'll get considerable mileage out of the three words you mentioned. I won't repeat them here, because there's no point in giving the Feds a karma boost they don't deserve.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
You're absolutely correct about this law enabling individuals to bypass the protections we've built up since our country was founded.
And that's not the worst of it. Individuals can harass other individuals.
But the same tactics can apply to groups within the law enforcement agencies. And that makes it too easy to implement a police state without ever passing another law. They can monitor anyone / anywhere / anytime without any oversight or paperwork.
Goodbye Democracy.
Always go under the impression you are being watched 24/7 and anything you say or do *will* be seen/read/heard and used against you at some point.
Even if you are doing nothing wrong, still assume the above.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
> Denying officials access to these systems would be like denying them access to certain buildings.
If they want to access certain buildings they need to get a warrant. The analogy is perfect.
"Our right to privacy is protected by the need for warrants; making it harder for officials to conduct lawful investigations just helps criminals."
"Although it is true that most buildings will never need to be investigated some will have bodies buried under the basement."
I don't really care if the FBI has to spend an extra week serving me with a court order to force me to allow them access to my network. If defeating the proposed legislation means that every investigation takes a week longer and that some will go unsolved, then too damn bad. Citizens should not have to give up freedom and privacy for protection.
You make the argument that the FBI will still have to obtain warrants in order to snoop on people's networks. While this may be true, adding this capability to the current system opens the door for abuse and unauthorised activities by law enforcement, which is already occurring way too much with the current system.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
> I know you will all hate me for saying this
Not hate, but pity. You are saying, weather you know it or not, that you trust "the" government implicately. That it acts with flawless disregard to persnoal bias and with benevolent efficiency. Well let me tell you, from first hand knowlege that this is far from the case. Govnerments make careless mistakes, are not always benevolent, and are filled with little worker bees many of whom are looking for a way to further themselves some how. When a completely innocent family is broken apart, a successful man is wrongly accused, or a company full of well-paid workers is dashed to peices becuase of a groundless complaint, and the only thing "the" government representitive says is "Well, I have an order to seize all assets, it says so on this paper..." I hope you will remember how you feel about government "officials" and how they should be able to do whatever they want.
Never trust your government. Never. Ever.
Now, if they have nothing to hide, why are they so worried that we know how often this tool is used?
If privacy is dead, then transparency is our only hope. But the current mood in our government is to trust no one -- not a single citizen. Yet somehow, anyone in law enforcement or homeland security is deemed automatically trustworthy.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
They don't need this in place before a warrant is issued. They can get a warrant, go to ISP, and say, "We need you to put this device in your network and send a copy of all traffic passed to and from user X to this network port."
No upgrade required. The only time you'll have a problem is if there's no open ports on any router, which is unlikely.
The idea of the FBI putting a device on my ISP's network isn't so much a violation of my rights, as it is a violation of the rights of my ISP. Even with a device in, no traffic should be sent to it without a warrant. I think the device should be left out until there's a warrant, for my ISP's sake.
This is just adding another way for bad people to get into places they're not supposed to be....i mean, if the government can monitor me while on the internet, whats to stop "the bad guys" from using the same thing thats built right into the router?
Newsflash: the government is "the bad guys". Unless you don't mind being spied on by them, of course.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
I was going to write: "What rubbish! Did you learn all the intricacies of BS from Frankfurter's essay?" until I caught your last sentence "Our right to privacy is protected by the need for warrents; making it harder for officials to conduct lawful investigations just helps criminals." This last part caught my radar and it either makes your sarcasm super-sharp and I applaud you or you are appallingly brainwashed. I hope it is the former and not the latter.
Either way, I'll point out the problems with the stance your post takes:
1. With a backdoor, who says they will ever pursue a warrant? A purpose of the warrant is to make it legal, but also that I open my door to them.
2. No one in the US is denying them access to their buildings with a warrant. With a warrant, they can get in anywhere they want in the US. If it is outside the US, well too fucking bad - they'll just have to -gasp- work with Ipol and the police there. Also, since they can only impose hardware restrictions in the US (if they can at all, I don't this is kosher), this tainted equipment will only be in the US. On the flip side of the coin, would you want China or Russia to decide what backdoors your equipment needs for them to gain entry?
3. A backdoor for the government will be discovered (as Window's generic CD-IDs have in the past), rendering said equipment (like routers with built-in firewalls) useless. I'm being defrauded already at purchasing and making my network vulnerable to all.
Let me say it: FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION!
The US government is probably the most powerful threat to peoples' security, but it is certainly not the only threat.
Whether or not the FBI manages to mandate that backdoors be installed in your ISPs equipment, you have to already assume that some backdoors exist. Maybe the government already did some of it while no one was looking, maybe some peeping tom at your ISP did it so he could read your love letters, maybe organized criminals are trying to build a database of names and social security numbers, whatever. You damn well know that not everyone is able to secure their system, or that they don't have your best interest as their top priority, and that includes the ISPs. Big Brother and all his Little Brothers are already a plausible threat, and this particular story doesn't change a thing.
It is your responsibility and my responsibility to make sure that we have protected our privacy. Encrypt your mail. Make sure your next stupid web server project can do everything on top of SSL. Meet with people and expand the PGP WoT. Assume the government and the identity thieves and the little green men from Alpha Centauri will completely subvert the network, and work on protecting the endpoint(s) instead. As it has always been, the Internet isn't trustworthy, so don't get your panties in a bunch just because someone wants to make it worse.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Has the memory of 9/11 faded that much?
When you have to trot out that bogeyman, it means your argument has no value. Back under your rock!
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
No. And I find it very telling that it is brought up so often by people who want to take away our Rights.
Fascism has nothing to do with Jews.
Fascism depends upon identifying an "enemy of the state". This "enemy" has to be so terrible that the Rights of the rest of the citizens must be "temporarily" restricted to prevent the atrocities that these enemies will surely bring.
The Nazi party identified Jews, Communists and Blacks as "enemies of the State". Pay attention to history.
And I never said that it was "inefficiency" that lead to Fascism. What I said was:
"Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people."
Freedom is not safe nor is it free.
Our Forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence knowing that their signatures would be used to condemn them to death if the British won the war.
They believed in Freedom enough to PUBLICLY identify themselves and their beliefs.
They fought and died for provide those Freedoms to you. And now you want to sell those Freedoms because there is a slight chance that you will be injured or killed.
The chance of a "terrorist" killing you is LESS than the chance of someone in your own family killing you.
It is LESS likely than you being killed on the highways.
Yeah, these people were all wrong about Freedom when they signed their death warrants back then:
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/signers/
It's so good of people like you who are willing to sell our Freedoms and Rights for a false sense of "security".
Makes sense to me. Totally.
hang brain.
Put "lawful intercept" back doors everywhere, and how long do you think it will take the next Kevin Mitnick to figure out how to exploit them? Remember that the FBI wanted remote access, so physical security won't help, and that 38,000 FBI passwords were so lame that a cracking program could guess them.
Nor is this theoretical. The Greek prime minister and many government officials found themselves eavesdropped on through the "lawful intercept" features on a celllco switch. To belabor the point, whoever was doing it was not the Greek police.
In south america they let you carry handguns on planes (no joke, .22 and .380 calibers, which, with a shot to the eyepatch can put someone down, despite the weak calibers (very accurate too, no significant recoil)).
Strange, I don't hear of terrorists blowing up planes there.
I recall a flight on air Iberia (spain) that got "hijacked" for about 15 seconds by uzi wielding terrorists.
Seems that their Israeli UZI were no match for the varied makes and calibers used by the citizens packing on the plane (back then they were allowed to).
This was an exemplary show of citizen responsibility. The passengers blew the terrorists to blood soaked pulp. They then enjoyed the rest of their flight. On landing, after the bodies were bagged and dragged off, they were told "thank you for flying air iberia, please watch your step on your way out, thank you for flying Air Iberia."
Voila, armed citizens equals no terrorism issues for us. Big government is what caused terrorists to exist. Before the civil war, and lincoln's MASSIVE expansion of federal powers, America enjoyed a VERY heavy dosage of goodwill from all. Even the Brits. The founding fathers feared a huge army, and look at what we've done to our fine nation? (By the way, if you quote abolition, there were founding fathers who did it, there's even a biography in stores now, the father in question was G. Wythe, VA).
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
No kidding...which proves the point a lot of us have been saying for a damn long time.
This isn't about terror, this isn't about child porn.
Hell, the NSA request to ATT came in February of 2001, before 9/11.
This is about setting up an authoritarian Judeo-Christian Police State. Finally, finally it's becoming apparent.
If information is meant to be hidden, it is all but impossible to stop it from remaining hidden in this day and age.
The solution is at our fingertips (but maybe only for a while) and that solution is firearms an ordnance.
Take back the country, by force if neccessary.
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
Hmmm... The day they push this through is the day I go buy a router that *I* compile the firmware for.
If they make THAT illegal?... I am not sure... I might just become a criminal...
I believe that it is you that needs to work on your "cognitive thinking".
Well, unless your name is "Richard Pipes" I don't believe that he posted here.
Are you his secretary? Are you scheduling his appointments?
If not, then learn to support the statements that YOU make. Don't try to dump your claims off on someone who is not here and has not posted.
Actually, I did address them.
The "consequences" you speak of are nothing more than emotional reactions by people who do not understand statistics. And those "consequences" are what the "terrorists" are attempting to achieve.
So, if you are afraid because a terrorist killed someone, then the terrorist has "won" that round.
Nice attempt at a strawman. I did not say that the United States has no enemies. North Korea and Iran and two obvious examples.
But you won't stop North Korea or Iran by spying upon what US citizens say in chatrooms.
Just as McCarthy's witch hunts to find "Communists" in "Hollywood" did not in any way, shape or form hinder Soviet Russia's activities.
Did you understand it that time?
It was you who brought up "cognitive thinking".
It was you who tried to deflect arguments to "Richard Pipes".
It was you who could not understand that McCarthy did nothing to hinder Soviet Russia.
It is you who is resorting to personal attacks. That would seem to indicate that you're cache of "logic" has been expended.
Statistically, you are more likely to die from suicide than from a terrorist attack.
The only reason that terrorism still exists is because people do not understand statistics and allow their emotions to be manipulated. You've chose the emotional side of this issue and I have chosen the rational, statistical side.
You've been listening to way too much Republican propaganda.
The fact is various different intelligence and investigative agencies already had all of the pieces of the plot in different datasets necessary to detect and stop the 9/11 attacks. However, the various agencies did not communicate with each other for various different reasons--some legal, some turf. In theory, this is why the Department of Homeland Security was created--to facilitate the kind of sharing needed for these cases. Whether it will be effective is a debate for another day.
But let's repeat the important part again, so that it has a better chance of being recorded in your brain: The various different intelligence and investigative agencies already had all of the pieces of the plot in different datasets necessary to detect and stop the 9/11 attacks. In other words, the "openness and freedom" that existed before the 9/11 attacks still managed to tell us everything we needed to know about the attacks.
It was the government that "let us down" by not connecting the dots. Of course, they don't want to say it that way because it makes them look bad, so suddenly we need all sorts of new surveillance laws to collect data that we don't need.
"You appear to be under some kind of delusion that the Government is a sort-of monolithic realty carved in granite that is separate, distinct, and eternal, from you, and that it serves to provide a groundwork of truth and justice on which your entire reality rests. Well, let me assure you, the Government is run by people not very different from you or me. The only difference is, they got there first." --"V" V is for Vengeance
If there is a "secret backdoor" in routers and switches, it will be found by security experts both white and black hat. This will open up ENORMOUS security and privacy issues. Compromise a machine, get it to link to the routers and switches and just collect the info. Could it BE more obvious? And if you think a warrant will be used, you're imagining things. Accoding to Bush, he doesn't need a warrant for anything while we are "at war." The war is just an excuse to allow his group to snatch more power for themselves and take more away from the people. If he was REALLY interested in fighting terrorism and defending the homeland, the closing of borders would have been the FIRST thing he did, not the last and most reluctant thing...
And the phone taps were abused then too. Look at how wiretaps were used against Martin Luther King Jr. Simple because the FBI wanted to prevent communists from getting in the civil rights movement, they were able to take a man for years and later use the recordings as little more than blackmail. Insert terrorist instead of communist and what do you get: 21st century America.
I am always intrigued by how people refer to this entity named government, as if it were some sort of an impersonal machine, out there, floating on some cloud. However, truth is that the government is no more than a mutable group of people, so why not give this a try: take the top post and replace government with friend/neighbor/boss/co-worker, and then let us know whether you have a problem with them knowing all those details about you; after all, the theory of six degrees of separation asserts that they are pretty close to someone who should have access to that information (if they don't have direct access).
Once you bring it down to earth, and make it personal, you'll find a lot more people have an issue with a database of information regarding their actions, habits, and thoughts.
"Do you have something against the regular police wiretaps done with warrants?"
Those are fine, assuming the warrants are based on probable cause and issued by an independent court. But those aren't the issue at all here.
Is it now illegal to make your front door out of steel, because it would make it too difficult for police with a warrant to break it down? That's what we're talking about.
We're talking about mandating bad security, so that it will be easier for police with a warrant to break it. If you understand anything about security, you'll see that it also makes it easier for anyone, including criminals inside and outside the police force, to break it.
In other words: this increases the risk of crime in order to make a wiretapper's job more convenient.
Lets say, for instance, that my business competes with US businesses, or has competitive procurement where some of the parties involved are US businesses. There is a significant chance that my sensitive data will be accessed by the US government and passed to US competitors or those US businesses I am dealing with (Hint: The French were notorious for this, and their security people reputedly even bugged business class seats on Air France).
Am I willing to accept this risk - hell no. SOLUTION: don't buy any more IT gear from the US - the Chinese/Taiwanese/Japanese/Europeans (exept the French) have just become more trustworthy. RESULT: The US IT sector will need to host a few more farewells, to say goodbye to a few more export markets!
...then why should you accept being treated as a criminal ? This planet will just become one day a Zoo with chipped, tattooed and rfid'd humans wandering around lining up happily for their free daily beating.
Some say it doesn't matter if someone else is always listening/watching. Well, do you speak and behave the same if someone is watching ? Can you pee with someone standing beside you watching ?
Hell, I'm not in the U.S., still I've come to a point where I don't even sign [before you start, I mean gpg] my e-mails going to the U.S., let alone use encryption.
I'd never use network equipment with backdoors known to have been built in (and I don't even have trade secrets to guard). Would you ? Would a company ? Would they prosecute you if you use certified hw with backdoors but keep everyone out with proxies and firewalls ? Or would they then make it also illegal to filter network traffic ?
Am I going too far ? Maybe. But sometimes you have to think further. Where can a road paved with ever more often restrictions lead ? If the police gets more freedoms while you loose your freedoms, what does that tell you about your future ?
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
How true.
Coincidentally, I was having a conversation about the US approach to (or, rather, retreat from) issues of freedom with a group of Europeans last week, and this was just one of the issues that came up. It was unanimously agreed that the powers of the US secret (and not so secret) police were beginning to become alarming. Their possible future effects on the rest of the world are even more alarming.
Not only does the US have a big say in how the internet is run, they also produce or licence a significant proportion of computer kit today. OK, maybe the US supply to the world market will die the death and other countries will take up the slack; but that's not the issue, is it?
Other countries are trying to follow suit - look at the UK. They have a law called RIP (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) act. This is a misnomer because it is really the HOMUP (Hand Over Massive and Unrestricted Powers) act. Sounds very much like the US Patriot act (BTW, that was a clever name - "If you don't support this act, you can't be a patriot".)
There was a time, not that long ago, when the US prided itself as being the leaders of the free world. Perhaps they should hand the baton over to someone else before they drop it.
Do you know who created the Taliban? Who trained Al-Qaeda? Who then ditched them after it looked as tho they weren't going to be able to serve the purpose of protecting that huge oil pipeline Unocal was salivating over? That's right. WE did. We created this enemy. It's not like there are some bearded towel wearing kooks on the other side of the world that just straight up hate our freedoms... oh no no, they have a much much deeper seated hatred for us. Why we would worry about them is another question altogether however. The taliban tried to hand Osama over to us multiple times and were refused each time. It seems we still needed the bogeyman for other purposes after he bombed those US Embassies and the USS Cole.
You're nothing; like me.
"all they have to do is repeat three words over and over again. Terrorism, child porn. Terrorism, child porn. Terrorism, child porn."
You forgot drugs and drug traffickers. The "war on drugs" has been at the forefront on our loss of civil liberties in the last fifty years or so. Before that there were the McCarthy years with the communist purges. There were also a lot of terrible abuses of peoples civil liberties by the states and feds during Prohibition as well, until that is we found the good sense to repeal the insane amendment.
There is a long history of abuses in this country. Usually the abuses have been restricted to a minority of the population and no one else seemed to care. The beast that has been allowed to feed on the hapless minority is larger, hungrier and more insecure and aggressive. Now the people of the majority have begin to smell its foul breath and feel the chill of its shadow. This is a natural progression of this type of abuse of power and should have been expected by all. IMHO those who have created, supported, simply ignored or indeed often applauded this beasts self righteous feeding frenzy on others will deserve the attention they get when its fear driven hunger is directed toward them.
"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." Thomas Jefferson
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
Association fallacy's such as the logical argument tool "reductio ad absurdum" (reduction to the absurd) or "reductio ad Hitlerum" (reduction to Hitler), which are what Godwin's Law attempts to thwart, are tools of debate usually employed to expose a contradiction, fallacy or weak argument. They really should not be used to set the framework for such discussion. I do agree that Godwin's Law does indeed express valid concerns when applied to a lot of Internet discussions. Such hyperbole has been way to common and often has been an indication of a weak argument, and such does tend to degrade the whole environment. In its essence the law would tend to promote discussion of more depth. However it also has the inherent tendency to apply a "political correctness" to such discussion. At some point Godwin's Law becomes untenable as valid limiter for the frame of discussion. Fascist states rarely happen overnight. Such a state is often the devolution of a Democracy or Republic and as such the decline is deceptively gradual. The signs of such trends toward fascist like states are apparent today in many lands including the USA and UK. To ban these observations in discussions because of the wish to elevate the content at some point defeats the validity of the discussion.
If you haven't already, you should read some Hermann Hesse. The novels Krieg und Frieden, Steppenwolf and Demian are insightful as to the stealthy insipid effects of such "politically correct" rules on discussion in social environments leading to a fascist state. Or maybe some George Orwell, the novels "1984", "Animal Farm", "Coming Up For Air" were also somewhat interesting in this regard. I do agree that those that rant incessantly and illogically in such a manner are in no way helpful indeed they often actually defeat their own agendas. Since my point of view is often tainted by these types I wish many would just shut-tf-up.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
Ah, I see the propaganda machine has been doing its job. Do you really think that "terrorists" are just people born with an irrational hatred for "freedom" and that's why they blow themselves up just to terrorize people half way across the globe from them?
Why are we so often the target of terrorism, and not other countries? How come Canada doesn't have to worry about terrorist attacks in their country, despite their defense budget being miniscule compared to ours and their equally (if not more) free and open atmosphere?
Do you think Palestinians simply have a genetic defect which compels 17 year-old girls who once aspired to be journalists or teachers to strap bombs to their chest and blow up Israelis? Why would a nation with no standing army want to purposely instigate war with the second most well-armed nation in the world--thanks to the billions of dollars of annual defense aid from the U.S.? Because they've got some sort of terrorist gene and the Israeli government just isn't doing enough to protect its citizens?
Terrorism starts when desperate people are pushed to extremes through continuous oppression. It's what desperate people resort to when they have no other recourse. It has nothing to do with whether a government is performing its duty to protect its citizens. That's why no matter how much money we pour into "defense" and the War on Terrorism, and no matter how much power we grant to our government, we'll never be as safe as countries that don't interfere with the democratic will of foreign nations, that don't manipulate the political process of other states, don't impose suicidal economic policies on developing nations, and don't exploit weaker nations for their economic resources.
But keep buying into whatever CNN/Fox News wants you to believe, and ignore the obvious realities that are in front of you. The fact that the military industrial complex exerts enormous influence over our government and is exploiting our position as the world's superpower for its financial interests has nothing to do with the creation of terrorists, I'm sure. It's all just a bunch of crazy rag-heads who have a fanatical hatred of "freedom" and "democracy"...