Slashdot Mirror
Lessig Predicts Cyber 9/11 Event, Restrictive Laws
A number of readers are sending in links to a video from the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference last month, in which Lawrence Lessig recounts a conversation over dinner with Richard Clarke, the former government counter-terrorism czar. Remembering that the Patriot Act was dropped on Congress just 20 days after 9/11 — the Department of Justice had had it sitting in a drawer for years — Lessig asked Clarke if DoJ had a similar proposed law, an "i-Patriot Act," to drop in the event of a "cyber-9/11." Clarke responded, "Of course they do. And Vint Cerf won't like it." Lessig's anecdote begins at about 4:30 in the video.
About 6000 people die in the US every day, day in and day out. Some days are higher, some are lower.
Think about that when looking at 9/11 and considering what the fallout of it has done to this country.
From the standpoint of someone who knows a couple people who lost their lives that day, and has direct connections with people who lost loved ones that day, I will still stand here and say very rarely a day doesn't go by when it doesn't piss me off how people have used the events of that day to control populations and steal from the American people for an event that represented barely a 5% blip in US deaths that week.
How many people who died that day do you think would believe the deaths of several other Americans and perhaps a *hundred* Iraqis was worth their life? How many people that day would think the tattered wreck of our global standing and economy were worth it for vengence?
Get off your fucking high horse. Our country could use a giant dose of taking it lightly and maybe taking real things that are happening seriously for a change.