"but what it does mean is that those who use the "you're going to gitmo" angle when criticizing the usa's spy actions just sound ignorant
go ahead and criticize the usa, be my guest. but please try to sound vaguely educated on the subject matter of world governments, rights of citizens, and government abuses and where the usa stands in that spectrum"
Once they violate the various Constitutional protections we had (I mean have; yeah that's it) for one reason, they have precedent to expand their reasons for doing so. It is intolerable to allow the government to break these rules for any citizen for any reason. If you allow it to occur at all, then eventually the government will break any rule for any reason at all. Oh, wait, by my count more provisions of the Constitution are ignored now than at any prior point in our history.
When Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus during the Civil War (a time when, unlike now, there was a legitimate threat to the continued existence of the US), his actions were questioned as unconstitutional. How's that for vaguely educated?
3) there are things the government won't bother to prosecute you for, but will instead send you either to Cuba, ER countries, or any other varieties of violation of due process that haven't made it to the public ken.
If you're building a desktop, i agree. however, while possible, it's a bit annoying presently to build your own laptop. Given that you're not building, then it's kind of annoying to be giving MS money for something you have no intention of using. And it's harder to find a prebuilt machine (laptop especially) without an OS than it is to find one that comes with Linux.
hardware vendors are squeezed for profit margin. selling windows preinstalled adds a bit of margin. Perhaps the studies they may or may not have conducted to determine market demand indicated that people who wanted linux also wanted a lower price tag for the hardware. Perhaps this expectation was inflexible, meaning that unit margin on a given PC would go down if they were to sell without MS. Or if they didn't conduct that study, maybe this is one of their fears that keeps them from offering linux product.
They used to make a product called the Spaceball, but since Logictech bought them, they've moved to space*. Maybe they were afraid of Mel Brooks coming after them for Copyright infringement.:P
But the trackball is my favorite 2d product, though the new ones aren't as stable/sturdy as the older ones. I've noticed my new one will occasionally tip, affecting my navigation.
Really, I was just being snarky: if you or I test drive a few different operating systems with our (or our organization's) needs in mind and we call it formal, we get laughed at. If this guy does so, he gets to not only call it formal, but also delineate the temporal boundaries of the formal period of his evaluation. It's meaningless. He took a test drive. Call it that.
In a world where I was potentially being serious, I might have responded to your arguments thusly:
since you accuse me of question-begging, i will answer the question you allege i begged, namely to outline the varyingly "formal" evaluation pathways. The currently accepted norm is that two markets for software products require evaluation: safety-critical and security-critical. Some few systems have requirements for both, but rarely is this acknowledged. The reason for this is the evaluation standards for each community are quite burdensome, but have relatively little overlap, even though one might think they would.
In the US especially, the safety critical community is divided further, into avionics and medical; evaluations are overseen/conducted by the FAA and FDA respectively. The two primary standards the FAA evaluate under are DO-178B and ARINC-653. Each has several levels of scrutiny depending on the potential consequences of failure of the software at hand. None of them are formal in the sense that properties about the code are proven mathematically. They are instead formal in that a list of functional requirements is provided, as is a traceability matrix that links the specification to the code that implements it and vice versa. Typically the higher levels of evaluation mandate things like an absence of extraneous code resident on the system. Current safety evaluations are not modular, and have to be fully reiterated even on the smallest change to the software. If you were to buy an OS that has been in a product that has been evaluated, you would also want to buy their evaluation evidence or else you'd have to reproduce it.
Security critical software is evaluated, in the countries that are signatories to the Common Criteria Treaty (forget its actual name), under the common criteria. Again, it has a variety of levels of intensity of evaluation, but more tricky is the fact that there is another variable: the anticipated use and threat environment, known as a protection profile. The Common Criteria website explains it far better than I'm capable of: http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/
This site includes a list of operating systems that have gone through evaluation. Most of them are evaluated to levels 3-4 on a scale of 7, which seems fairly good until you examine their protection profiles. Most of those assume no malicious users, and a variety of other restrictions that preclude consideration of threats common in most deployment scenarios. The reason for this is that vendors want to garner marketing cachet by being able to claim a high evaluated assurance (EAL) level, assuming the multidimensional system will confuse prospective buyers. This happens on both sides of the MS/everyone else isle.
So, the evidence from an evaluation is indeed closely held by the companies that have products evaluated, but the idea in having a "neutral" third party evaluate under a more broadly common set of criteria was to shift away from groups closely holding net results, while allowing those results to still be meaningful, especially for comparing different companies' products. You see, there is no competitive advantage in being evaluated and not telling anyone your score.
"Halamka's month with Ubuntu concludes his formal operating system evaluations. What follows are the details of his experience running Ubuntu and his plans for his company's enterprise desktops and laptops moving forward. Will he finally replace Windows forever with OS X or Linux? You'll see..."
Funny, I didn't see any Bell-LaPadula models or ACL2 proofs, or anything other than some user's opinion clouded by the random crap that happens to every user of every OS.
Yes, but there is a soft societal limit to "outrageous." For moneylenders, we call this usury. Obviously this varies according to your society. In Japan, usury used to begin @ 100% interest. In the US, it's typically ~30%. A bit off topic, but a good example.
On topic, those of us in Virginia are variously upset over civil penalties for a variety of traffic violations. They start @ $1000 and go up from there.
So, yes moderately disproportionate penalties are a deterrent, but at a certain point they become a weapon. The defendant argues that the RIAA are employing the damages portion of the copyright act as a weapon to extort the lower "settlement" fees from him unjustly. And given the other areas they've behaved like thugs in his case, he's probably in the right. For instance, RIAA filed for summary judgment asserting that the defendant hadn't appeared, when in fact there are court transcripts that place the RIAA lawyer and the defendant in the same room at a pretrial conference.
Actually, the defendant is challenging the Constitutionality of the damages portion of the Copyright Act. Since this has broad and sweeping consequences, the result is an engraved invitation to the DoJ to attempt to preserve the status quo. This assumes that the status quo is generally desirable, and in many areas of law, it is.
Here is the paragraph above the one i initially posted wherein the defendant challenges the whole copyright damages provision:
"Pursuant to Rule 24(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Defendant Boggs is submitting concurrently with this Answer a Notification to call the attention of this Court to his challenge to the constitutionality of the statutory damages provision of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 504(c). Pursuant to Rule 24(c), "when the constitutionality of an act of Congress affecting the public interest is drawn in question in any action in which the United States or an officer, agency, or employee thereof is not a party, the court shall notify the Attorney General of the United States as provided in Title 28 U.S.C. 2403." Section 2403 of Title 28 requires that when the constitutionality of a federal statute "affecting the public interest is drawn in question, the court shall certify such fact to the Attorney General, and shall permit the United States to intervene for presentation of evidence, if evidence is otherwise admissible in the case, and for argument on the question of constitutionality.""
Just as the Plaintiff is required to notify the court and the DoJ
from the Plaintiff's answer and counterclaim:
"Rule 24(c) further provides that "[a] party challenging the constitutionality of legislation should call the attention of the court to its consequential duty" to notify the Attorney General of the United Sates under 28 U.S.C. 2403. Defendant Boggs therefore is submitting concurrently with this Answer a Notification to call the attention of this Court to his challenge to the constitutionality of the statutory damages provision of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 504(c)."
Actually, you have a Sergeant's assertion that people he lived with misused his computer. Now, ordinarily I'd place a fair amount of weight on the Sergeant's assertion out of respect for the uniform and based on a common perception of the trustworthiness of our military personnel. However, that's not the point. The point is that both are making the same protestations of innocence by ignorance.
And your argument about the cost of the request is spurious absent evidence (and subjective evidence at that) which we don't have. It presupposes a common state of mind between yourself, myself, and Vick regarding possessions. How many famous people have there been that have arguably squandered their income. They do it for a variety of reasons, some because they feel inadequate, others because they are lonely. Who's to say that this distant cousin isn't really good at playing his relative? Look at all of the sycophants stars and athletes surround themselves with. How do you know this is any different.
Personally, with the limited information available to me, I'm skeptical about Mr. Vick's asserted innocence, but I'm American enough to let him have his day in court before others armed with more facts. But I return to the fact that my original analogy extended only to his assertion of the same sort of defense as the Sergeant in the article at hand.
About a month after MS announce the date they will shelve support for XP. Remember when XP was shiny and new, or at least shiny and a year old and businesses had a low (though not quite as low) adoption rate? As soon as they announced the date of EoL for 2000, businesses started adopting. It'll happen again this time. MS collects from business about 2 years after each OS release by coercing them by pulling support.
Again, not talking about anything other than that both defendants have claimed not to know about the use their property was put to. I didn't address the strength of either party's assertions because the evidence isn't in the public record. So in that both defendants were making the same claim relative to their potential culpability for activity conducted using their property, i assert that it is a good analogy, much the same as the comparisons made in the parent to my first message.
If we assume that everyone who is charged with a crime is guilty *as charged* we have no justice system, or at best a Napoleonic system. And they are the same in that the RIAA asserts that the Sergeant was the actor in the copyright infringement occurring on his computer, while Vick's indictment asserts he was an actor in the illegal activity occurring on his property. If either the RIAA's complaint or Vick's indictment lacked these features, the cases would be thrown out at once. In our justice system we rely on the *evidence* to judge the merits of a case against *any* defendant, criminal or civil.
The "pseudo-logic" was actually logic isolating the similarity of the two cases, which is that both defendants are asserting they had no idea of what was occurring. It's actually a common tool when referencing case law to demonstrate the strength of the precedent and its relevance to the case at hand when the subject matter of the cases is unrelated, but the point of law is.
BTW: I can be more sophomoric outside of the context of my arguments: Suck it, Trebek!
The difference between civil and criminal law is that a violation of law that is civil effects just the victim and criminal law violations effect not only the victim, but society at large. This is why they are punished by different means and are prosecuted by the government.
Essentially your argument boils down to "Vick was accused of a more heinous transgression, so his assertion of unknowing is not valid. Whereas the Sergeant's alleged activity was less severe, so his assertion of unknowing is valid."
In general, there is no such causal relationship between severity of alleged crime and veracity of defendants' claims of unawareness.
In truth, each defendant's claims will be evaluated by the judge/jury in question and the cases will proceed or not as they will. However, both are making the same claim, which was my original point that you couldn't see.
Again, if you don't like the law that is being enforced in the civil court, then work to have the law changed.
1. prove Vick's motivation was as stated. Recurse back to the unknowing possession entry point above.
or
2. prove Sgt. Paternoster *didn't* buy his computer for the purpose of copyright infringement. again, recurse to the unknowing possession entry point above.
But both are causes for legal action. One criminal, the other civil, differentiating them, as you do, by their severity. The fact remains that both are "illegal" and can land you in hot water. Don't like it: work to change the laws.
They release both paper dust and toner dust. I've known people who've gotten several sinus infections over their tenure near large print/shred stations (several B/W and color printers, fax, fine grain shredders.)
Get a portable HEPA filter and droop it in the vicinity of your printers and your problems (if you have any) will get measurably better.
I'd suspect more/.ers think Vick is likely responsible for the crime he's charged with than the Sergeant in question in the article. My guess on that would be the nearness of his activities to us geeks or our unwillingness to consider copyright violation a proper crime/civil liability. Or perhaps we just assume that everyone else is a stereotypical non-geek and is incapable of understanding the internet box they bought.
That was just an excerpt from the blog comments. I included it to show that there were actual comments of some merit or other on the site. Of course, I know it's theatre. That doesn't make it any less annoying to have your shave cream looted before you get to your business meeting. Or to have your Congressional Medal of Honor paraphanalia stolen from you: http://forums.realpolice.net/archive/index.php?t-2 5284.html
Personally, I think they ought to be forced to take down the posters of stuff they've taken from passengers designed to make them look good and us feel like criminals. Instead, they should put up posters of all of the stuff they had no business taking. It might make us non-criminals feel like someone in that agency is trying to keep the beast in check.
Of course, this is all stated from the realistic premise that TSA isn't going anywhere. I'd love to have the old America back, you remember: the America where you didn't even have to show id to travel and assemble... But that part of the Constitution isn't relevant anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
"but what it does mean is that those who use the "you're going to gitmo" angle when criticizing the usa's spy actions just sound ignorant
go ahead and criticize the usa, be my guest. but please try to sound vaguely educated on the subject matter of world governments, rights of citizens, and government abuses and where the usa stands in that spectrum"
Once they violate the various Constitutional protections we had (I mean have; yeah that's it) for one reason, they have precedent to expand their reasons for doing so. It is intolerable to allow the government to break these rules for any citizen for any reason. If you allow it to occur at all, then eventually the government will break any rule for any reason at all. Oh, wait, by my count more provisions of the Constitution are ignored now than at any prior point in our history.
When Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus during the Civil War (a time when, unlike now, there was a legitimate threat to the continued existence of the US), his actions were questioned as unconstitutional. How's that for vaguely educated?
3) there are things the government won't bother to prosecute you for, but will instead send you either to Cuba, ER countries, or any other varieties of violation of due process that haven't made it to the public ken.
If you're building a desktop, i agree. however, while possible, it's a bit annoying presently to build your own laptop. Given that you're not building, then it's kind of annoying to be giving MS money for something you have no intention of using. And it's harder to find a prebuilt machine (laptop especially) without an OS than it is to find one that comes with Linux.
hardware vendors are squeezed for profit margin. selling windows preinstalled adds a bit of margin. Perhaps the studies they may or may not have conducted to determine market demand indicated that people who wanted linux also wanted a lower price tag for the hardware. Perhaps this expectation was inflexible, meaning that unit margin on a given PC would go down if they were to sell without MS. Or if they didn't conduct that study, maybe this is one of their fears that keeps them from offering linux product.
They used to make a product called the Spaceball, but since Logictech bought them, they've moved to space*. Maybe they were afraid of Mel Brooks coming after them for Copyright infringement. :P
http://www.3dconnexion.com/products/3a.php
But the trackball is my favorite 2d product, though the new ones aren't as stable/sturdy as the older ones. I've noticed my new one will occasionally tip, affecting my navigation.
some like craftsman chisels and unbranded, cheap hammers, while others go all snap-on.
:P
BTW: no brand lasts much more than 100 years in fact, very few companies do, and those are quite interesting companies.
me, i like my Dutch East India Trading Company Darjeeling Tea.
as per my earlier comment to another article.
0 58857
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=258135&cid=20
or was that supposed to be "get along"? whatev.
Really, I was just being snarky: if you or I test drive a few different operating systems with our (or our organization's) needs in mind and we call it formal, we get laughed at. If this guy does so, he gets to not only call it formal, but also delineate the temporal boundaries of the formal period of his evaluation. It's meaningless. He took a test drive. Call it that.
. cfm.
In a world where I was potentially being serious, I might have responded to your arguments thusly:
since you accuse me of question-begging, i will answer the question you allege i begged, namely to outline the varyingly "formal" evaluation pathways. The currently accepted norm is that two markets for software products require evaluation: safety-critical and security-critical. Some few systems have requirements for both, but rarely is this acknowledged. The reason for this is the evaluation standards for each community are quite burdensome, but have relatively little overlap, even though one might think they would.
In the US especially, the safety critical community is divided further, into avionics and medical; evaluations are overseen/conducted by the FAA and FDA respectively. The two primary standards the FAA evaluate under are DO-178B and ARINC-653. Each has several levels of scrutiny depending on the potential consequences of failure of the software at hand. None of them are formal in the sense that properties about the code are proven mathematically. They are instead formal in that a list of functional requirements is provided, as is a traceability matrix that links the specification to the code that implements it and vice versa. Typically the higher levels of evaluation mandate things like an absence of extraneous code resident on the system. Current safety evaluations are not modular, and have to be fully reiterated even on the smallest change to the software. If you were to buy an OS that has been in a product that has been evaluated, you would also want to buy their evaluation evidence or else you'd have to reproduce it.
Security critical software is evaluated, in the countries that are signatories to the Common Criteria Treaty (forget its actual name), under the common criteria. Again, it has a variety of levels of intensity of evaluation, but more tricky is the fact that there is another variable: the anticipated use and threat environment, known as a protection profile. The Common Criteria website explains it far better than I'm capable of: http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/
This site includes a list of operating systems that have gone through evaluation. Most of them are evaluated to levels 3-4 on a scale of 7, which seems fairly good until you examine their protection profiles. Most of those assume no malicious users, and a variety of other restrictions that preclude consideration of threats common in most deployment scenarios. The reason for this is that vendors want to garner marketing cachet by being able to claim a high evaluated assurance (EAL) level, assuming the multidimensional system will confuse prospective buyers. This happens on both sides of the MS/everyone else isle.
There is also a page on that site for products that have gone through evaluation, and in the US flavored site there is a list of products under evaluation: http://www.niap-ccevs.org/cc-scheme/in_evaluation
So, the evidence from an evaluation is indeed closely held by the companies that have products evaluated, but the idea in having a "neutral" third party evaluate under a more broadly common set of criteria was to shift away from groups closely holding net results, while allowing those results to still be meaningful, especially for comparing different companies' products. You see, there is no competitive advantage in being evaluated and not telling anyone your score.
From the article:
"Halamka's month with Ubuntu concludes his formal operating system evaluations. What follows are the details of his experience running Ubuntu and his plans for his company's enterprise desktops and laptops moving forward. Will he finally replace Windows forever with OS X or Linux? You'll see..."
Funny, I didn't see any Bell-LaPadula models or ACL2 proofs, or anything other than some user's opinion clouded by the random crap that happens to every user of every OS.
Yes, but there is a soft societal limit to "outrageous." For moneylenders, we call this usury. Obviously this varies according to your society. In Japan, usury used to begin @ 100% interest. In the US, it's typically ~30%. A bit off topic, but a good example.
On topic, those of us in Virginia are variously upset over civil penalties for a variety of traffic violations. They start @ $1000 and go up from there.
So, yes moderately disproportionate penalties are a deterrent, but at a certain point they become a weapon. The defendant argues that the RIAA are employing the damages portion of the copyright act as a weapon to extort the lower "settlement" fees from him unjustly. And given the other areas they've behaved like thugs in his case, he's probably in the right. For instance, RIAA filed for summary judgment asserting that the defendant hadn't appeared, when in fact there are court transcripts that place the RIAA lawyer and the defendant in the same room at a pretrial conference.
Actually, the defendant is challenging the Constitutionality of the damages portion of the Copyright Act. Since this has broad and sweeping consequences, the result is an engraved invitation to the DoJ to attempt to preserve the status quo. This assumes that the status quo is generally desirable, and in many areas of law, it is.
Here is the paragraph above the one i initially posted wherein the defendant challenges the whole copyright damages provision:
"Pursuant to Rule 24(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Defendant Boggs is submitting concurrently with this Answer a Notification to call the attention of this Court to his challenge to the constitutionality of the statutory damages provision of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 504(c). Pursuant to Rule 24(c), "when the constitutionality of an act of Congress affecting the public interest is drawn in question in any action in which the United States or an officer, agency, or employee thereof is not a party, the court shall notify the Attorney General of the United States as provided in Title 28 U.S.C. 2403." Section 2403 of Title 28 requires that when the constitutionality of a federal statute "affecting the public interest is drawn in question, the court shall certify such fact to the Attorney General, and shall permit the United States to intervene for presentation of evidence, if evidence is otherwise admissible in the case, and for argument on the question of constitutionality.""
good catch. yes, defendant. thank you.
but the to-date defenses asserted are.
which was the whole point.
Just as the Plaintiff is required to notify the court and the DoJ
from the Plaintiff's answer and counterclaim:
"Rule 24(c) further provides that "[a] party challenging the constitutionality of legislation should call the attention of the court to its consequential duty" to notify the Attorney General of the United Sates under 28 U.S.C. 2403. Defendant Boggs therefore is submitting concurrently with this Answer a Notification to call the attention of this Court to his challenge to the constitutionality of the statutory damages provision of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 504(c)."
Actually, you have a Sergeant's assertion that people he lived with misused his computer. Now, ordinarily I'd place a fair amount of weight on the Sergeant's assertion out of respect for the uniform and based on a common perception of the trustworthiness of our military personnel. However, that's not the point. The point is that both are making the same protestations of innocence by ignorance.
And your argument about the cost of the request is spurious absent evidence (and subjective evidence at that) which we don't have. It presupposes a common state of mind between yourself, myself, and Vick regarding possessions. How many famous people have there been that have arguably squandered their income. They do it for a variety of reasons, some because they feel inadequate, others because they are lonely. Who's to say that this distant cousin isn't really good at playing his relative? Look at all of the sycophants stars and athletes surround themselves with. How do you know this is any different.
Personally, with the limited information available to me, I'm skeptical about Mr. Vick's asserted innocence, but I'm American enough to let him have his day in court before others armed with more facts. But I return to the fact that my original analogy extended only to his assertion of the same sort of defense as the Sergeant in the article at hand.
About a month after MS announce the date they will shelve support for XP. Remember when XP was shiny and new, or at least shiny and a year old and businesses had a low (though not quite as low) adoption rate? As soon as they announced the date of EoL for 2000, businesses started adopting. It'll happen again this time. MS collects from business about 2 years after each OS release by coercing them by pulling support.
Again, not talking about anything other than that both defendants have claimed not to know about the use their property was put to. I didn't address the strength of either party's assertions because the evidence isn't in the public record. So in that both defendants were making the same claim relative to their potential culpability for activity conducted using their property, i assert that it is a good analogy, much the same as the comparisons made in the parent to my first message.
If we assume that everyone who is charged with a crime is guilty *as charged* we have no justice system, or at best a Napoleonic system. And they are the same in that the RIAA asserts that the Sergeant was the actor in the copyright infringement occurring on his computer, while Vick's indictment asserts he was an actor in the illegal activity occurring on his property. If either the RIAA's complaint or Vick's indictment lacked these features, the cases would be thrown out at once. In our justice system we rely on the *evidence* to judge the merits of a case against *any* defendant, criminal or civil.
The "pseudo-logic" was actually logic isolating the similarity of the two cases, which is that both defendants are asserting they had no idea of what was occurring. It's actually a common tool when referencing case law to demonstrate the strength of the precedent and its relevance to the case at hand when the subject matter of the cases is unrelated, but the point of law is.
BTW:
I can be more sophomoric outside of the context of my arguments: Suck it, Trebek!
The difference between civil and criminal law is that a violation of law that is civil effects just the victim and criminal law violations effect not only the victim, but society at large. This is why they are punished by different means and are prosecuted by the government.
Essentially your argument boils down to "Vick was accused of a more heinous transgression, so his assertion of unknowing is not valid. Whereas the Sergeant's alleged activity was less severe, so his assertion of unknowing is valid."
In general, there is no such causal relationship between severity of alleged crime and veracity of defendants' claims of unawareness.
In truth, each defendant's claims will be evaluated by the judge/jury in question and the cases will proceed or not as they will. However, both are making the same claim, which was my original point that you couldn't see.
Again, if you don't like the law that is being enforced in the civil court, then work to have the law changed.
1. prove Vick's motivation was as stated. Recurse back to the unknowing possession entry point above.
or
2. prove Sgt. Paternoster *didn't* buy his computer for the purpose of copyright infringement. again, recurse to the unknowing possession entry point above.
itsatrap!!
But both are causes for legal action. One criminal, the other civil, differentiating them, as you do, by their severity. The fact remains that both are "illegal" and can land you in hot water. Don't like it: work to change the laws.
They release both paper dust and toner dust. I've known people who've gotten several sinus infections over their tenure near large print/shred stations (several B/W and color printers, fax, fine grain shredders.)
Get a portable HEPA filter and droop it in the vicinity of your printers and your problems (if you have any) will get measurably better.
or perhaps it's like this Michael Vick guy who lets his friend use his Virginia estate and lo and behold gets charged with dog fighting. http://www.suntimes.com/sports/490355,CST-SPT-swir e31.article
/.ers think Vick is likely responsible for the crime he's charged with than the Sergeant in question in the article. My guess on that would be the nearness of his activities to us geeks or our unwillingness to consider copyright violation a proper crime/civil liability. Or perhaps we just assume that everyone else is a stereotypical non-geek and is incapable of understanding the internet box they bought.
I'd suspect more
mmm.... double standard mmm... donut.
That was just an excerpt from the blog comments. I included it to show that there were actual comments of some merit or other on the site. Of course, I know it's theatre. That doesn't make it any less annoying to have your shave cream looted before you get to your business meeting. Or to have your Congressional Medal of Honor paraphanalia stolen from you: http://forums.realpolice.net/archive/index.php?t-2 5284.html
Personally, I think they ought to be forced to take down the posters of stuff they've taken from passengers designed to make them look good and us feel like criminals. Instead, they should put up posters of all of the stuff they had no business taking. It might make us non-criminals feel like someone in that agency is trying to keep the beast in check.
Of course, this is all stated from the realistic premise that TSA isn't going anywhere. I'd love to have the old America back, you remember: the America where you didn't even have to show id to travel and assemble... But that part of the Constitution isn't relevant anymore.