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White House Pulls Down TSA Petition
Jeremiah Cornelius writes with a note that on Thursday of this week "The Electronic Privacy Information Center posted a brief and detailed notice about the removal of a petition regarding security screenings by the TSA at US airports and other locations. 'At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House 'We the People' website. About 22,500 of the 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the Administration were obtained when the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition. The site also went down for 'maintenance' following an article in Wired that sought support for the campaign."
The reddit crowd already went over this one in detail... it wasn't pulled down...the petitions have a limited amount of time, and there was a standard maintenance window near the time this particular petition ended. So no big conspiracy...just normal network maintenance...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/court_orders_ts.html Nothing to see here.
That's simply not correct. The biggest legislative proponent of the TSA bill that eventually passed was Don Young (R-AK), and Bush strongly supported it throughout; he didn't "cave in" at the end. Its expansion into ever-more-intrusive measures was strongly supported and overseen by first Tom Ridge (Republican, former Governor of Pennsylvania) as head of DHS, and then by Michael Chertoff (Bush's 2nd DHS head). Chertoff, post-Bush-administration, is now closely connected with Rapiscan Systems, the backscatter X-Ray company.
Some in the GOP have slowly started waking up to the fact that they passed a bunch of stupid things in the post-9/11 era (Patriot Act, DHS, etc.), but at the time they were the ones pushing it, and very few (except maybe Ron Paul) opposed it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's utter bullshit. The government enforces the will of the people. Part of that means collecting taxes and providing for those who didn't get lucky in life. Get rid of the safety nets, the the people will find another way to provide from themselves -- by killing the rich and taking their things. The poor will not lay down in the gutter and starve to death, no matter how much the robber barons may wish it.
Taxes are the price you pay to live in a civilized society.
The petition was set to expired on August 9th and expired on August 9th but long before midnight, I was looking at the site when it happened but I don't remembver the time between 10 am and 2pm IIRC. Since we don't know at what time the petition was set up in July, it's difficult to say whether the White House cheated or not.
Using Gates as an example, he had a million dollar trust fund, sent to a very good school that had access to computers and a mother who associated with one of the head honchos at IBM. If this what you call not being born with a silver spoon in your mouth...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." -- Harry Lime
Well let's see now Mr. Lime (while ignoring that *whoosh* over my head), Switzerland also produced or was a sometime inspiration for: CERN, Jacob Bernoulli, Carl Jung, Voltaire, Rosseau, Freddie Mercury, and Nietzsche. And a few international banks which are far less reliable than cuckoo clocks. So perhaps people develop science, literature, art, and whatever economics is, independently of foreign relations.
Swiss politics involves town meetings with lots of talking, and thus real representations of local concerns instead of representatives in popularity contests (cool to have a beer with, has my family values? yeah I'll for for him/her). Switzerland's not perfect, not just banking but paying non-Swiss cheap wages for jobs the locals don't want to do; but other countries and especially the US with its take-down petitions could learn a few techniques. If, that is, the motivation was to improve democracy, which it's not.
Anyone can become wealthy. Look at Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, Ellison, Page, and Brin for a few examples. None of these folks were born with a silver spoon in their mouths
Zuckerberg - Son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. Wealthy enough to send him to Harvard.
Gates - Son of a Lawyer and a company director. Wealthy enough to send him to Harvard.
Bezos - Family owned a 39 square mile ranch. Wealthy enough to go to Princeton.
Ellison - OK, a modest background.
Page - Son of 2 computer science professors.
Brin - Son of a mathematics professor and a research scientist.
With the exception of Ellison, these aren't examples of "Anyone" becoming wealthy. They were indeed born with silver spoons in their mouths.
They are also an unusual selection in that they are all tech company founders. Most businesses and businessmen are not that, and are not creating whole new categories of business from exceptional intelligence and education.
Most businesses are set up in existing categories. And require more capital and less intellect than tech start-ups.
The petition was set to expire that day, so if you assume it expires at midnight, that's just a few hours short.
They have a month to get enough signatures, so it looks like people were just bad at promoting it. I'd go with glitch as well since the last TSA petition just got a response from the head of the TSA saying how wonderful it was.
but how much time was taken away by the early termination of the petition?
I'm too lazy to dig up wherever I read it, maybe it was a comment on hacker news, but it sounded like it had about another week to go before expiration.
It expired on the 9th. See, e.g. Bruce Schneier's post a week ago, or the Fark thread from the 8th saying 'it expires tomorrow'.