Slashdot Mirror
FBI Target Puts His Life Online
After the FBI mistakenly targeted him as a terror suspect five years ago, art professor Hasan Elahi began recording his entire life online for the perusal of government agents or anyone else who wants to look in. "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning. "It's economics. I flood the market."
You could at least try to slashdot the guy's site, it is^H^Hwas kind of cool.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Privacy nowadyas is like a religion. Some people believe in it, some don't; some fight to protect it. But it is still as intangible and unattainable as deities from other religions.
It's great that he's created the perfect alibi, and keeping himself out of accidental incarceration on Gitmo, but the real message here is that government institutions are way too sloppy, and that if you do not give up your privacy like this, you may be risking all sorts of harassment and worse. Innocent people do get locked up because of mistakes, malice, or a combination of both.
Sounds to me like he's just made it into some wierd pseudo-hobby. I don't think I could ever be that comfortable posting my every move.
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." Part 3, Chapter 6
His name sounds middle-eastern! He HAS to be guilty.
</sarcasm>
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
This was my friend's idea of how to destroy the CCCP. You take every classified document in the US, shuffle, and ship. They would have bankrupted the economy trying to find the gems in the huge piles of useless shit.
That whole "give away so much that they cannot use all the Data" might have worked back when all was done by humans.
0 0b5df10621.html . In short, a quote: "The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'")
Nowdays, you just buy some more computers to do the datamining and cross-referencing. Dont worry, there are thousands of PHDs working at google to make 1984 a reality.
(Dont believe me? Take a look what googles CEO says here : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c3e49548-088e-11dc-b11e-0
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Well, it's not paranoia if they're actually after you.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
I wanna become American citizen! how to apply citizenship? is it enough if I find american woman who wants to marry me?
...of users who put evreything on MySpace, Twitter or YouTube.
That the goatse guy gets on a terror watch list. Will keep FBI agents occupied and remind them of what our vice president has done to the country.
So, those 5 minutes you sat at your computer, are you sure you didn't send a short covert message to your terrorist cell? :-)
Seriously, crappy photos with cell phone quite probably are ignored (except by his operator who gets to charge for the traffic..) but any textual data can easily be mined. For example, given the list of all receipts from all supermarkets the feds could crossreference everything he has ever bought to the list of ingredients to build explosives or chemical weapons. Common household chemicals do react dangerously if you mix them around carelessly. For a suspected terrorist it sure is questionable to post online the lists of things he has bought and to taunt the feds to decipher his actions.
Anyway, to go public with a diary like that sounds like a begging egomaniac. If it were just for evicende, it's just as good if you stored it privately. Also I hope he has plenty of home security devices; he documents his coming and going pretty well so it's trivial for burglars to visit when he's gone.
How long before Bush forces the rest of the professors in the country to do the same? We're seeing yet another piece of Bush's plan to destroy freedom for the entire world.
Slashdot rules for the police:
1) Doing ANY research on an innocent individual is obviously completely illegal for the police
2) If any individual actually commits a crime, that's a failure of the police, not a problem in this individual
3) nobody, not even convicted murderers, are guilty
Obviously this is a recipe for disaster. The things the police is allowed to do should be well-defined, and respected, by "us", meaning the parliament. They should include, at least, surveillance of an individual, overt or covert, administrative arrest for a limited time, and the option to forcibly question anyone (without torture obviously), whatever violence is required to bring someone in for questioning is perfectly allowed for the police to inflict, wounds resulting from resistance against the police do NOT indicate a problem with the police, quite the contrary, a problem with the suspect.
As long as they stay within these limits, they can hopefully only do limited damage to an individual even if they are malevolent, and they actually have a chance of catching a criminal.
I do not see how this guy's rights were violated. Can someone please explain.
On the contrary, while I do not agree with the argument that his current actions are violating the rights of the state (of the police if you will), he is danguerously close to doing just that.
This principle is similar to Rivest's winnowing and chaffing cryptographic system, or the military countermeasures used to confuse self guiding missiles.
(*) but not fake terrorism, that would be counterproductive in his case :)
I understand the intentional irony in his actions, but I don't agree that it would work. It's the government, for crying out loud. They do not act rationally, neither in placing him on some terrorist watch list nor in continuing to monitor him because they don't trust someone with an Arabic-sounding name. Suppose his the batteries in his GPS unit fail - then the FBI would scream, "Get him! He's going off the grid!" My life is probably more boring than his, but I don't want invisible agents snooping around my house or following my online activities. Treat us like citizens should be treated, not like characters in a video game. I've never been detained at an airport, so I can't imagine what it's like to have to call the FBI before every flight.
What does one have to do to be considered a terrorist suspect?
Crap...
FAQs are evil.
He may be ready to give up his private life, I'm not. And if this is what it takes to keep out of the hands of some overzealous, hyperparanoid government, than the best solution is to depose that government.
How can you live in a world like that? That's not 1984, that's 1984 under Stalin with Hitler and Mao as his henchmen. That's Bush, Cheney and Rice for you.
would be "FBI gives attention whore perfect excuse"
Let me tell you a story. An "in Soviet Russia" kind of story. A true one at that. The story of how the state kept all those people in line and not fighting oppression.
Short story: lack of privacy. And literally FUD. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt over what they'll do about your words and deeds.
The side of the story everyone knows is the KGB and GULAG part. Those are true, and were especially true in Stalin's times. But then it evolved into something that worked cheaper and better: thinking that Big Brother knows everything you do. So people started to avoid doing or saying anything that could bite them in the ass.
The illusion was that the secret police has dossiers (the dead tree kind) on anyone and everyone, and that it _will_ come back to bite you in the ass sooner or later.
Even if you realized that in such a low tech setting they can't know _everything_, you didn't know exactly _what_ they know, and exactly _what_ and _when_ they'll use it against you. Maybe they'll do nothing. Maybe they'll send you to Siberia. Maybe you just won't be allowed to travel abroad any more. Maybe your kid won't ever get a high paying job because his dumbass father got drunk once and complained about the party.
Worse yet, this naturally killed support for any dissidents. If comrade Piotr speaks against the party, egads, you don't want it on your dossier that you sat, listened and nodded. Do you really know if Piotr isn't an agent provocateur? Or if he's just a dumbass, who else in your circle of friends will run to tell the authorities about that talk? Better avoid Piotr entirely from now on. Better safe than sorry.
_That_ is what privacy is supposed to help against.
And that is what "privacy is just a religion" and "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" lemmings just don't get. Sometime, at some point, it may become _necessary_ to do something "wrong" to just freakin' keep your _other_ liberties. If you gave up privacy, then you might as well give up everything else, because you won't have any means left to defend them. If it ever becomes necessary to resist the government, lack of privacy means you'll never get more than 1-2 disidents which are quickly removed or isolated. As soon as someone does speak out, everyone else just makes themselves scarce, if they think the government will know where they are.
If everyone's life was public, the USA still would be a British colony, because everyone would be affraid to even be seen anywhere around those Jefferson and Hancock guys. India would still be a British colony too, because people would be affraid to be seen anywhere near that Gandhi guy. Etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You might be joking but that is actually a very good way to hide something -- just cover it with lots and lots of noise. I do that with our beloved friend -- Google. You see, it likes very much to gather my browsing history so in case of a court order it can quickly give it to any lawyer out there, so what do I do? I run the TrackMeNot Firefox extension. It sends a fake query to Google about once in 5 or so seconds. Let Google figure out which one is me browsing and which queries are submitted by TMN. TMN is actually pretty smart while I was typing this it asked Google for such things like "describe dept that", "Chinchilla Farm Investigation", "officials representing diverse views" and "each selective router" -- not bad, just as crazy and random as my own queries would be...
With the nice big red arrow saying "Hello, I'm no where near where live, please come by and rob my house."
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
At least it was the way to live for Elahi.
Just shows how much overboard the thing got.
The more scary thing is that... it was also the reason,
for which US went to war with Iraq: they couldn't prove guilt nor innocence.
It's not anything like a religion. Many people seem to be unable, much like you, to see that you _need_ privacy to live a happy life. Much like you need clean air to live a happy life.
Yes, you can survive without both, clean air and privacy. Yet, is this a life you want to have?
Go watch "Life of others". It is really depressing to live in a surveillance society.
Maybe those countries who did _not_ experience Gestapo-like distrust, arbitrariness, and the mental consequences this brings to your personal life, _have_ to go through a phase like that, to be able to value what the founding fathers tried to establish by the right of anonymous speech and the pursuit of happiness.
However, this would be only the second-best solution: I personally know people who lived in East Germany, and even if some of them experienced this kind of soul-destroying constant pressure only in their childhood, they are spoiled for life. When they talk to me on the phone and hear a click, their _first_ thought (if they want or not) is that somebody is listening in.
This is absolute terror.
...as a terror suspect.
Wait a minute, I thought the definition of suspect was "regarded or deserving to be regarded with suspicion", in other words, the FBI was 'suspicious' about him or his activities with relation to acts of terrorism.
What I can't seem to find any information on, is why were they suspicious ?
Oddly enough, the FBI didn't suspect me, or anyone that I know; and with good reason, they don't need to be. I doubt I, or anyone I know, have ever done anything that could be considered suspicious with regards to terrorism. (plenty of other stuff, mind you, but not terrorism)
In fact, so far, my guess is that the vast majority of FBI suspects deserve to be suspects. They have enagaged in activities which correlate to indicators of intent to commit acts of terrorism. When there is enough of a correlation, the FBI rightly 'targets' them, becuase their activities are 'suspect', and they become a terrorism suspect. I like it that way; keep up the good work FBI.
If Professor Elahi he really wanted to convince me that he was 'wrongly' targeted, he would publish some more detail about his questioninng, his past activites, and explain why it was such an egregious wrong to have been suspicious of him. Instead what I see is a sophomoric reaction to, as far as I can tell anyway, a legitimate suspicion, wrapped in the guise of 'conceptual art'. Please spare me, I've been to the Tate Modern and seen enough unmade beds, feces covered walls, and vats of urine to know art when I see it.
I work for the FBI and I say he's a terrorist!!!
Of course he's doing photos to proove differently. (Bin Laden made whole movies(!) and made channels show them on TV.) But what does he between the photos? Does he force women to hide their faces. Does he force children to hold and use a rifle?
We, the FBI and CNN, will find out.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
An FBI agent willing to put his life "online" as well as "on the line" :-)
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
Perfect alibi... right, manipulating digial photographies and GPS logs is really hard
As a regular human beings, doing what other human would do, like working, eating, shitting and so on, I don't see much point about privicy. The only disadvantage would be when grudge or theft applies, the first is annoying but revenge is bad, insurance is there to solve the latter situation. Pure minds are only a dream, IRL minds of such are dishes for dinner. A good guard has to know how intruder works to be good.
Basically the Nazi system wasn't all that dissimilar in it's inner workings to the tactics employed by Senator McCarthy and his goons except it went much further. Those who got named weren't merely socially ostracized as they were in the USA, in Nazi Germany and the cooupied territories they got sent to a camp and executed. There was actually a group of people both in Germany it self and the occupied countries who made a tidy business out of regularly informing on anybody that acted even mildly suspiciously. Once the Gestapo did lock in on you they were practically guaranteed to find _something_ to hang you with. Believe it or not, purely out of fear of a Gestapo visit, people both Germans and non Germans sorted the scrap paper they used on the toilet in case it contained any leaflets or other printed material from politically unreliable elements or, god forbid, contained a picture of Adolf him self. People today may find that funny but there were actually people who did long stretches in KZ camps or even died there for the simple offence of insulting the visage or persona of the 'Führer'.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I grew up thinking that one cannot have freedom without privacy. But having thought about it a bit, they seem like orthogonal concepts. Of course, this depends on one's definition of freedom and privacy. Very roughly speaking, the definitions I use are: 1. Freedom is your right to act as you choose so long as your actions do not harm others, and 2. Privacy is your right to control the dissemination of information about yourself. You might argue that lack of privacy can limit choices by the threat of embarrassment, but freedom does not preclude embarrassing actions from your choice set. In other words, freedom does not require your choices to be easy and embarrassment-free, just possible. This is not to say that privacy isn't a right worth fighting for. But I don't think we should use the right to freedom to justify the right to privacy.
Well, if Microsoft got its way, he wouldn't have to bother.
is to make all secrets visible, and hide them with interpretation.
Security through obscurity is no security at all.
Likewise privacy through obscurity is not true privacy at all.
He has just thrown off the illusion that we have privacy.
I think everyone can agree that if someone wants to find out something about you, or your past it can be done with sufficent effort/time/resources.
So why not live a wholesome life and keep it open. I imagine it would also lead oneself to make decisions in a much more dignified manner.
Someone who gets it. What a great economic analogy, too.
He also exposes the hypocrisy of youth as well. We have a bunch of people running around screaming about Big Brother on the same MySpace page they just uploaded pictures of themselves sitting on the toilet, next to a list of what they ate for lunch.
When I read this I am sort of more happy to be living in Germany. We have the Datenschutzgesetz a law which at leats tries to protect our personal data ...
That's how I first misread the headline. The real headline and the guy's story is actually pretty pathetic. He gave up. They won. They'd love it if everyone else did the same.
...called freeze frame:
quoted from the imdb summary at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363095/
"Sean Veil is an ultra paranoid murder suspect who takes to filming himself round the clock to provide an alibi..."
a quite decent movie, actually.
This reminds me of the film Freeze Frame. It's about a man named Sean Veil who gets framed for a murder, and after he is acquitted he dedicates his life to recording every single moment of his life on tape. I won't spoil the rest, but I thought it was a great film (and appropriate for this subject matter)
...every word of his autobiography.
After all, it *is* on the internet - hence can be taken as gospel.
Perhaps he should Wiki his life!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
From the article:
the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants.
If he's going out of his way to look like the quintessential terrorist, the FBI should have investigated.
It upsetting to see so many people say.. "See, what a good idea."
First off if this guy has not committed a crime, why is the FBI watching him? Where do they get the authority to do this if they have nothing on him? If they *DO* have something on him, why haven't they arrested him and charged him formally? What ever happened to Due process.
Secondary.. he has given up his privacy not willingly but under threat of imprisonment and torture in Guantanamo, where he would not get a trial to defend himself at all. This is like saying you gave the mugger your cash willingly and the gun he was pointing at you is irreverent. Like a mugger.. the government is pointing an invisible gun at this man and some of you cheer the fact that he has given up his privacy, sugesting that we all do the same?
Have you people lost your mind?
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
It takes quite an ego to think that every moment of your life is worth another person's moments of life to watch. I'm certainly not saying this guy has an ego problem, quite the opposite in fact, he has an ego solution. With a trumped up enough ego a case could easily be made to say that recording ones life and whereabouts is a creative act and should have every protection the mafiaa is pulling for. It would then be illegal for anyone to watch it without paying him whatever he asks first (that is, unless the FBI broadcasts your life over the radio, but as we read yesterday the riaa is working on that as well).
National security you say? The way I see it if every movie pirate walked into walmart and stole the DVD rather than downloading it, it would count as a national security problem (though that is based on there being enough illegal movie downloading that such an act would be statistically apparent against the background of regular shoplifting, which I don't have numbers to support) and the FBI would have to take the mafiaa's side which leaves enough of a descrepency that it might be lawyerable... or has "national security" really come to mean "current governmental security"?
Either way, if I were writing a script about a terrorist/activist/person-who-actually-cares, my character would definately try to play one system against another rather than single handedly taking one system on.
Who would be dumb enough to try and rob this guy's place while the FBI are watching his house?!
... except for the fact that it never worked that way.
1. The state, especially an oppressive one, will always find some way to classify its own actions. For state security reasons, or to thwart imperialist spies, or fighting terrorism. So you end up with a lopsided situation, where they know everything about you, but you know only the non-classified parts about them.
Comrade Piotr from the example can conveniently ommit the 5 minute part where he phoned to the KGB for his weekly report. In fact, the law can actually require that he does. There you go, you're back to square one, because that transparency doesn't work both ways.
How are you going to prevent that? Require that everyone tracks their own life in 5 minute increments? Start suspecting everyone who didn't fully detail every single cigarette break? Plus, we'll get to that later.
The state can also devote disproportionately more power to tracking connections, than an individual dissident can. If comrade Piotr regularly spends his evenings with comrade Vassili, who's spending too much time with comrade Anna, who happens to be the secretary of a NKVD colonel... what does this tell you? Is that a reporting chain, or is Vassili's interest in Anna purely a romantic affair? Is he telling the truth there when he said he's just going there to fuck her, or was he writing his reports at her home? How much effort _can_ you dedicate there to prove that all that, for all your acquaintances, up to 6 degrees of separation? Do you even have that kind of time and energy? And do you want to raise suspicions by conducting that kind of an investigation?
2. Even if it worked that way against the state, a society without any privacy at all is a perfect recipe for herd mentality and mob rule.
The easiest way to keep everyone in line and doing X, no matter how much they hate X, is to think that everyone else wants and appreciates X. That chest-thumping pro-X is the way to be seen as an upstanding pillar of community. Whole cultures and societies were built on that kind of groupthink. Whole wars were built on having millions of people think, "omg, I can't speak against this war, the others would think I'm unpatriotic."
You can have 1000 people who, individually, are against X. Now put them in a setting where they think that the other 999 is unwaveringly pro-X, and indeed might ostracize anyone who is anti-X. Watch them all chest thump and proclaim their unwavering support for something which they all secretly abhor.
The usual way out of this starts with... some privacy. You have one friend you know you can trust, and can maybe diplomatically probe their opinion in private. But the key there is: in private. Noone would do that directly in front of the other 999, and if they did, they'd be instantly condemned by 999 people (who incidentally think the same, but wouldn't admit it in public.)
It's much like, say, a liquid boiling. It has to start with small bubbles, or it won't start at all.
Elliminating privacy for everyone, is just the perfect recipe to create a groupthink that's self-perpetuating for ever.
Do I think it would be worse than our own? Yes, I can claim just that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I wonder how long it will be until some burglar figures out when he will be away for awhile and empties out his house. Or until some identity thief learns enough about him to empty out his retirement account. etc...
The government is not the only threat out there.
I'd be less worried about the growing loss of privacy if I knew less of human nature and politics.
Google figuring out what I like and offering up appropriate advertisements does not bother me. They are observing my browsing habits, and really don't care about the specifics of the person on the other side of the glass. They only care about things that directly impact their ad revenue.
Contrast this with people in power. People in power tend to gravitate towards the public having their lives exposed completely, while they themselves maintain an ever increasing code of secrecy. The less you know about a person, the less likely you are to exert power over that individual.
This is the exact opposite of good government. Publicly elected officials should have little or no privacy when acting in the government's capacity. The only exception to this rule should be items of national security, which should remain only open to those who have security clearances.
While I'd like to think that this younger generation is promoting a blanket-wide "openness" of private life, from my point of view they outright suck at it. They are making the general populace's lives more open, but have considerably failed to make the doings of elected officials and related government more transparent. (Wiretaps, unprotected whistleblowers and vote rigging, oh my) If this pattern continues, we will be coasting into a true dictatorship / fascist society, and it will become very difficult to pull us out of it.
I'm in favor of more openness. But let's be reasonable here. The government needs to be at the forefront of this endeavor. If they aren't, we're likely to have problems that will make Soviet Era Russia look like Disneyland.
With all of the mention of privacy, I can't help but think that identity is inescapably linked. Nearly everything that I do is public in some way - unless I do it in my own home, alone, quietly, with the shades drawn. But I do have separate aspects to my life that doesn't necessarily need to be shared universally. I have many identities.
We all do many things with people, our friends, co-workers and acquaintances; but we don't necessarily share those with our other groups. Privacy is important so that we can exercise, explore and express the different aspects of ourselves. The same person can be the quiet & conservative worker, a raver, a revolutionary, devoutly christian and a criminal.
Privacy allows us ownership of our identity and ourselves.
...the government might ship him off to guantanamo anyway
for documenting US infrastructure.
- Chris Z. Wintrowski -
[ Site ]
(Opinions Ted Nelson's, not mine or IBM's.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
A few authors have proposed futures where it is illegal for any entity to hide information. At first it's hard to see how this might be an improvement over a society where people are guaranteed privacy. But if you think about it carefully, being able to know everything about anyone and anything, and others knowing the same, is more nuanced than it would seem. It's the inequity in privacy that is responsible for many of its ill effects.
At least that's what I think. Sometimes.
It terrifies me that you used minutes as your increment of time. What the hell are you doing in there?
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Iraq was a keystone in the arch of a middle east that had been stable for as long as he was in power (which is why the US backed him to the hilt in the 80s). Now he's gone the country has collapsed and is drawing the rest of the region in; Iran and the Kurds directly, Syria, Lebanon, Israel et al indirectly, through Iran's increased regional power. If/when Iran goes the way of Iraq or the region just descends into a general regional war a good percentage of the world's LNG reserves will be beyond reach, on top of the oil that is already lost in Iraq. Apart from the direct effects of having less energy the knock on effect will be to dramatically increase the power of countries like Russia and (particularly) Venezuela, who between them have most of the energy reserves outside the Middle East. If Chavez and Putin are still in power at that point the outlook may not be good for the US.
Yahoo/Google FBI "Phil Zimmerman" investigation PGP [http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/03/06/06/144 1247.shtml]
... need to practice and hone their
investigative, interrogation, framing ... and other skills. It is the
spun-patriotic duty of US citizens (like Hasan Elahi, Phil Zimmerman ... and others who may belong to EFF, ACLU ... and other anti-fascist
patriots, attend DEFCON, 2600 ... and other technology conventions ..., and ...) to assist the FBI ... others at finding other stuff of
possible TIA (not Thanks In Advance) interest to National
Security.
..., this is America, anyone could have their name
legally changed to avoid being on a suspect list of potential
criminals. The FBI (... and others) always hangout at technology
conventions' with their friends (the attendees), monitor's anti-war
peace organizations, because it is safe and plays well in the USA
news media ... and other stuff .... I really appreciate all the
assistance provided by folks ... and others to the FBI ... and others
for all the real hands-on training they provide to the FBI ... and
others on ... other stuff too. GOD BLESS all these great American
patriots.
... and other ... all working together for a better
America and a bright future with a “NewWorld” order,
“Sieg Heil” over terror and fear.
The FBI, NSA
I mean the name “Hasan Elahi” is an obvious stage-name for an FBI CoOp (like chicken-coop) instructor/professor that is providing training for folks. If it was a real issue
I bet, Hasan Elahi (whoever he really is) is a real good friend with Phil Zimmerman and they have many things in common with FBI agents
History always repeats, because it is more fun the second time around and the one-line puns don't get forgotten before they can be used again.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
He's probably plotting right in front of L's eyes.
In some places. Just like there are places where you're not allowed to smoke, or not allowed to drink alcohol. Alcohol is actually the best comparison here: some time ago I read that in some parks you're not allowed to drink alcohol, but the police won't interfere with well-groomed, law abiding people drinking rose on a warm summer evening. It's mainly so they have an excuse to arrest homeless people drinking a beer there.
If you look like an average guy with a job, the police won't stop you from smoking a joint in public. If you look like you're homeless, a drug dealer, in a gang, or Moroccan, then they will. The point of these laws is not to stop people from doing it, but to have an excuse to arrest people that are considered "trouble". Ofcourse if we get a slightly more repressive regime, that category may end up including people with outspoken political opinions that differ from the government's, demonstrators, foreigners, poor people, or basically anyone that's not on the government's list of favourites. And that's why these kind of broad, arbitrarily enforced laws are evil.
>Which flavor of Islam is practiced in Indonesia, Jordan or Egypt
A brief recap of the sectarian violence in iraq and answer to your question:
1. iraq is diverse, but has a shi'ite majority
2. saddam helped prop up the sunni majority while he was in power, and helped oppress the shi'ite minority. Despite this Saddam is viewed as a relatively secular leader. Relative to the region. Which is to say that he was secular *at all*.
3. The shi'ite were pretty pissed off about their prior marginalization under saddam, which caused them to persecute the shi'ites after saddam was taken out, which caused the shi'ites to blow up the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which caused all hell to break loose and left us in the situation we are in now.
4. Of the surrounding states Iran is run by shi'ites. Most of the rest are run by sunni's (in the whole arab world, shi'ites are a tiny minority localized around iraq and iran).
I think our reasoning for not handing over control to neighboring arab states in 2003 was something like:
1. iraq has a quarter of the worlds oil, it would be nice to control that
2. no neighboring states are really neutral in iraqi internal religious conflicts, and none are secular. As a third party we might be able to set up a secular state that would diffuse internal conflict.
What really ended up happening:
1. Since the end of the war, iraqs oil pipelines have spent a significant amount of time *on fire* because angry people *exploded them*.
2. Instead of becoming a neutral intermediary between the sunni and shi'ites, the US forces started as a common enemy, and became a third combatant in the sectarian free for all.
Oil.
Not complex. Not many reasons. Just oil.
The fact that there are other, collateral, "benefits" to America is just "happy fallout".
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Copyright (C) 2007 Amendment TV. All Rights Reserved
So, he's tracking what US Government computers are doing, and he travels abroad. What better evidence of nefarious intent could you have. Straight to Gitmo for you, do not collect £200, do collect an orange boiler suit and a pair of ear-muffs. Don't ask where the toilets are - you'll be hosed-down later.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"