And Pournelle and Niven would be amongst the first to volunteer for such duty, hence their presence in the novel: that was Heinlein, Pournelle and Niven in disguise, if you catch the references.
As Bush was hale, hearty, and in communication with his government, Cheney had no authority to issue orders to take down airliners. What the hell was Bush doing? Running for cover. Nothing else illustrates so well that Bush is a self-important little puppet of the real president, Cheney.
Sigh. The tactic used on 9-11-01 will never be useful again. No group of passengers will ever cooperate again, no pilot will let anyone take the wheel again. Will we please give up on this. Locks aren't necessary, tactics aren't necessary. The hijackers tried to take 12 planes but only had the manpower for 4. They had to strike simultaneously, and one time only, because it would never work again -- and indeed did not, even on that very day, as the passengers listened to the news from their cell phones and took down their own plane. Or maybe were shot down at the same time, as that plane was splattered over miles.
Al Queda is not in the business of killing people at any cost. They are in the business of ridding themselves of our presence in Saudi Arabia -- and we left the bases and established new ones in Iraq to replace them. bin Laden got what he wanted, which Americans would know had they ever been able to actually listen to what he was saying. Instead we are told that he is everywhere and trying to destroy our freedoms and kill us all at any cost. Why do you think they haven't struck again in over five years? They had what they wanted, as we left the holy land.
First, it's SF, or science fiction, not sci-fi. "Sci-fi" was coined by movie reviewers in the '50's to sound cool. No one in science fiction used the term.
Now. I used the term "real world" from Asimov and Greenberg's "Best of [fill in year]" SF short story collections. Asimov's opening essay would sum up what was happening in the world, that Mel Brooks was Melvin Kaminski still. Then he would list what was happening in the Real World of science fiction that year.
We, the children of Asimov, the Real World of SF, respondeth:
In 2007, fearmongers were still pumping the handle on the "terrorist" shibboleth. No one had attacked the US in over six years, yet the citizenry was still being told that an attack was imminent, could come from anywhere (yet still somehow was related to planes), and that the enemy was Islam, though that meme was heavily cloaked in buzz words. Homeland Security, named seemingly by George Orwell himself, was rolling up the country's police and intelligence forces into one incoherent and unmanageable mess. The rightist militias, one member of which had actually blown up a federal building in Oklahoma City, were still marching and conducting drills to take down the government, yet were curiously untouched by the new American police force. We were still attempting to occupy a country that we had been assured was about to attack us at any moment, and we were losing.
Mel Brooks was Mel Brooks.
In the real world, the collected writers of science fiction, addressed as "sci-fi" writers, were asked to come up with ideas to block the immiment attacks against our helpless country. Jerry Pournelle probably leapt to the the defense, while the others in more or less said: There are no terrorists, and there is no such enemy as terrorism. If you are trying to find a way to fend off attacks, first, you cannot. The preeminent architects of the future, we scruffy bunch, will tell you there is no way to prevent an intelligent attacker from finding a way to hurt you, if he or she is willing to die to strike a blow. We spend our lives imagining ways to do the impossible. Yes, in five minutes we can give you a dozen ways around any security protocol you can come up with. If you block those, we will find another dozen. The same attacks can be achieved in any place that is not a military prison. If you wish perfect safety, make your nation into such. And you still will be afraid, for it is not a matter of security, but of perception of security. You grow fear in your people like mold, and you devour that mold as your sustenance. You are making yourselves an army of George Hearsts through selling fear and the antidote for the fear, so assuaging the fear is increasingly out of the question, is it not?
Try instead not to manufacture enemies. You created bin Laden to strike at the Soviets in Afghanistan in the seventies, who claimed they were there to stem the rise of militant Islam. They were right and you were wrong. You invaded Afghanistan to strike at al Queda, even though they left long before you bombed the country. You annihilated Iraq, then turned it into a occupied prison state. You are now surrounding Iran with two carrier groups and tried to add a third, but the Navy refused to cooperate. If you bomb them, 90 million people will take up arms against you, and yes, all the attacks you tell your people to fear will then become very real. Mission Accompished, indeed.
We can't help you. You are your own enemy, and you will never defeat yourself. Try shattering the mirror.
Emp. Encryption has a shelf life, not that I'm terribly worried about the RNC reading my archives. Encrypted files will be decrypted using future technology much faster than we think the breakthroughs will come. I'm also not worried about my data being "stolen", as it is on a foreign server and is therefore theirs. What I wonder, rhetorically, is if they claim ownership over the bits on their server. It's a trick question, as the answer is "yes", firstly, and even if it were not, the terms of your contract with Google gives them the option of changing the terms at their pleasure. So, good place to stash your artwork, not so good your email archives and chat logs. Young Americans grew up with no idea of privacy at home or in school, so it's hard to make the point about the lack of it.
Q for you: what does Fission give you that Audacity doesn't? I like their software, but I don't see the need for Fission when I've Audacity. Other than stripping the MP4's of their spydata, of course.
Human rights transcend contract law. You can't sign away the right not to be falsely accused of pedophilia. Corporate person or real person, contract law has limits.
Somewhere in the vast wasteland of your software licenses, some joker may have inserted the right of his company to adopt your children against your will. Ha ha, you clicked through.
Q: Does Google claim to own the rights to access the data, or even to own the data? And they do hand it over to warrantless searches by secret police types, not so? Not asking idly; I tend not to use "free" services as they claim to own the data I upload.
Because they'll make it a suspension offense to disguise or refuse to carry a tracker. And they could just install them *in your textbooks* or your very prominent name tag which you are required to wear at all times proudly on your chest where they can verify that you are in compliance. And if you play games with the tag by passing it around or clipping it to a cat, then yet again a suspension offense. And if the frog boils as well as it has been, eventually it'll be a criminal offense. They'll think of a way. Theft or unauthorized use of school property, or some other excuse. Ditto all this for your job, or living in a homeowners association, or a gated community, or working for the government.
Don't go off so much on government; you can change a government. Watch what the private entities do with the information. Watch all these "private equity" partnerships that have suddenly sprung up, buying everything in sight, taking companies private, and are not answerable to the SEC or stockholders. Things are happening. Fear those men, for you'll never know who or where they are.
Just had a sad, devious thought: it's legal for a third party corporation to buy access to real-time data tracking GPS coordinates of cell phone users, but the government needs a warrant. Ohhhhhh. Sick. That "silly oversight" of letting private entities buy access makes sense -- the Bushies simply let a private operator track the data, then they tap the operator to track citizens, under the table when they want, and somehow think they are getting around the laws requiring warrants to obtain permission to spy on "criminals". Damn. They've used this shell game in other matters to get around laws. So obvious.
All cell phones made and sold after 2005 have GPS trackers built-in, and can report their location to the meter to the carrier, second-by-second, whether the owner wishes it so or no. Little known fact: that tracking data is available to third parties for a fee. Anyone with a newer phone is already part of the New World Order, as George's dad named it. Just a matter of flicking a software switch in the phone, so opting out via the phone's menu isn't worth spit.
And NO, using the cell towers to triangulate isn't the same. They didn't keep logs, it was imprecise, and rare. Now it is acceptable to track everyone constantly, and no one even notices.
" Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
WOAH. False Choice fallacy winner here.
"A think tank" study, eh? I don't have to look at the name, as I can guess. Lissen up; the "think tanks" are really, REALLY well funded right wing propoganda outlets dressed up as friendly wonks. Who's picking up the tab for this "think tank" study? Would that group have a deep interest in reaming us bloody with corporatized, right-sized monopoly services? Uh-yap. Damned near all of the "think tanks" are deeply married to the very wealthy. Their agenda is the ascendancy of their spouse.
The muni services have been litigated to death, and those few who managed to survive are throttled for funds by friendly neighborhood lobbyists working the local governments. What few, very few experiments that exist managed to survive by partnering with some corporation like Google, which kinda isn't exactly a municipal wifi network, but yet another granted monopoly.
Years back I totalled up what Americans have spent on their "free market" net connections. The figure is enormous. I then calculated, on the high side, what it would have cost for the Feds to fiber up every town in the country, Interstate Highway style. I never hear people complain about the highway system, even tho it's cost trillions in adjusted dollars over the last half century and literally rode over local governments. It's not even close. We could have had fiber to the house for a fraction of what we've been screwed for, and for a hell of a lot less than what they are about to screw us for in perpetuity.
Now, we don't even need the fiber to the home; we could build municipal fiber backbones with wifi nodes and even cat5 connections to the citizens. We could do it for, what, a few tens of billions of dollars? And then it would be done but for the maintenance costs. And we'd not have to spend 25-100 bucks - each - a month for crap service. We'd have gigabit to the home or megabit to the air. If we didn't want to make it a "market" system, we could make it free, anonymous, and as capacious as we liked. We don't do it that way for ideological reasons.
The "free market" thinktanks want to hold us upside down and shake the change out of our pockets. They aren't anyone's friends but their investor buddies'.
Ah, but hydrogen requires production, distribution, and sales, therefore: the oil companies can buy themselves a hydrogen-based economy much like the oil-based one they now own. Hydrogen=profit.
Solar cells on roof of house, or square miles of them in a desert, generating power for electric cars on a grid, burning nothing, distributing nothing, is a model for an economy that will depress their profits a bit. Thus it will not be, not if they have to buy every patent on solar power and battery/capacitor storage in existence. With hundred billion in total profits to spend each quarter, it's just a matter of when they feel like getting around to it.
""Free speech" refers to a prohibition on censorship by the government;"
No. A corporation can censor. It just did. I can dig up a definition if you like. And a corporation is not a god-like being beholden to none. The owners might like to think so, but no.
what child porn on the net? how do you know it's there? you ever look? no? who told you, then? ever consider the idea it's not there? that this is this generation's communist plot to take over America, or that Satanists killed ten thousand babies in Mississippi?
it isn't there, people! they are lying or exaggerating whatever little is out there to cow us into accepting surveillance on the net. you won't look, 'cause it's wrong and the FBI is monitoring Google to catch you doing it. so it's just the FBI and the other more spookier surveillance types telling us it's there. and we swallow the lie.
and consider the power the spooks have now: all they need do to nail a political opponent is say he looked at kiddy porn. Bush's people already pulled that stunt on one of their most honorable opponents, former marine Scott Ritter, weapons inspector, who insisted bush was lying in 2001. he was arrested for kid porn, and he was no longer welcome on TV or the papers. they then dropped the charges, no explanation. bang. rep dead. anyone else want to embarrass bush or cheney? want to be a kiddy porn trafficker on tomorrow's news? message received.
How does "everyone know" kiddie porn is out there unless they've been looking for it? It's one of those things "everyone knows", like the communist infiltration of America and all those terrorist cells "everyone knew" were ready to spring into action in 2001.
I wonder how they're gonna build all those prisons?
Ah, YES. We ARE in prison. Everyone on probation or life arrest, GPS phone tracked, huge fines paid every month for the rest of their lives, rest of the money for lawyers and government monitoring fees. You status as a criminal or non-criminal is just a boolean assignment. They don't need to lock you up. They merely need to change the intensity of the monitoring already you live with. Keep you from ever working a real job again. Keep you from voting, ever again. Impoverish you.
I really know nothing of all the bullet and assassin theories. But I do know this: damned odd that a mob nightclub owner just wanders up and pops one into Oswald in front of God and Country for no damned reason at all. Killing your patsy is an old, old way of covering tracks, and the CIA/Cuban Plumber hacks specialized old school idiot schemes. Apparently Robert Kennedy agreed; it was obvious they'd have the motives and means. He IDed the CIA/Castro nuts as the ones who did it, but was helpless as he lost his job as AG when his brother was killed. He was set to start a real investigation when he became President. Then another weirdo popped up and killed him. Game over, insert quarter.
You are not mistaken. If you piss them off, or somehow are identified as a potential terrorist, you will disappear. This is not an exaggeration. A lot of people are missing. At least Padilla has a kangaroo trial right now. He won't win, of course, because by the rules he can't defend himself by confronting witnesses or examining evidence. And it can happen to you.
I won't fly. I swear to Chthulu, if the time comes to leave, I'm walking to Canada. I'll straighten it out after I make it to a town, but I will not fly, drive, or ride a plane or ship. Too damned risky.
I'd like anyone who's not living in the US, US citizen or not, to answer questions I don't see asked often:
How does it work in your country? Worse? Better? Is it legal to require background checks, political tests, Google searches, drug screening, the Infamous Anal Cavity Search to get a job in your country? I'd guess positions of security would require some of those, of course, but how about you folk who just want a Plain Job? And how about you US types working and living abroad: do you have to put up with all this where you are parked, if you don't work for a US corporation?
If we don't want criminals holding positions of security, or even to hold a job, how do you explain the reluctance to discuss George Bush Jr.'s DUI arrest, cocaine and drug use, or desertion in time of war? If we can't get a job without FBI checks and anal cavity searches, how does Fortunate Son get away with it?
After a certain income is achieved, do we get to forgo background checks? Seems like it.
Slashdot Mirror
SF.
And Pournelle and Niven would be amongst the first to volunteer for such duty, hence their presence in the novel: that was Heinlein, Pournelle and Niven in disguise, if you catch the references.
As Bush was hale, hearty, and in communication with his government, Cheney had no authority to issue orders to take down airliners. What the hell was Bush doing? Running for cover. Nothing else illustrates so well that Bush is a self-important little puppet of the real president, Cheney.
We are being killed by the locals because we are occupying their country. That's called resisting invaders, not terrorism.
Sigh. The tactic used on 9-11-01 will never be useful again. No group of passengers will ever cooperate again, no pilot will let anyone take the wheel again. Will we please give up on this. Locks aren't necessary, tactics aren't necessary. The hijackers tried to take 12 planes but only had the manpower for 4. They had to strike simultaneously, and one time only, because it would never work again -- and indeed did not, even on that very day, as the passengers listened to the news from their cell phones and took down their own plane. Or maybe were shot down at the same time, as that plane was splattered over miles.
Al Queda is not in the business of killing people at any cost. They are in the business of ridding themselves of our presence in Saudi Arabia -- and we left the bases and established new ones in Iraq to replace them. bin Laden got what he wanted, which Americans would know had they ever been able to actually listen to what he was saying. Instead we are told that he is everywhere and trying to destroy our freedoms and kill us all at any cost. Why do you think they haven't struck again in over five years? They had what they wanted, as we left the holy land.
First, it's SF, or science fiction, not sci-fi. "Sci-fi" was coined by movie reviewers in the '50's to sound cool. No one in science fiction used the term.
Now. I used the term "real world" from Asimov and Greenberg's "Best of [fill in year]" SF short story collections. Asimov's opening essay would sum up what was happening in the world, that Mel Brooks was Melvin Kaminski still. Then he would list what was happening in the Real World of science fiction that year.
We, the children of Asimov, the Real World of SF, respondeth:
In 2007, fearmongers were still pumping the handle on the "terrorist" shibboleth. No one had attacked the US in over six years, yet the citizenry was still being told that an attack was imminent, could come from anywhere (yet still somehow was related to planes), and that the enemy was Islam, though that meme was heavily cloaked in buzz words. Homeland Security, named seemingly by George Orwell himself, was rolling up the country's police and intelligence forces into one incoherent and unmanageable mess. The rightist militias, one member of which had actually blown up a federal building in Oklahoma City, were still marching and conducting drills to take down the government, yet were curiously untouched by the new American police force. We were still attempting to occupy a country that we had been assured was about to attack us at any moment, and we were losing.
Mel Brooks was Mel Brooks.
In the real world, the collected writers of science fiction, addressed as "sci-fi" writers, were asked to come up with ideas to block the immiment attacks against our helpless country. Jerry Pournelle probably leapt to the the defense, while the others in more or less said: There are no terrorists, and there is no such enemy as terrorism. If you are trying to find a way to fend off attacks, first, you cannot. The preeminent architects of the future, we scruffy bunch, will tell you there is no way to prevent an intelligent attacker from finding a way to hurt you, if he or she is willing to die to strike a blow. We spend our lives imagining ways to do the impossible. Yes, in five minutes we can give you a dozen ways around any security protocol you can come up with. If you block those, we will find another dozen. The same attacks can be achieved in any place that is not a military prison. If you wish perfect safety, make your nation into such. And you still will be afraid, for it is not a matter of security, but of perception of security. You grow fear in your people like mold, and you devour that mold as your sustenance. You are making yourselves an army of George Hearsts through selling fear and the antidote for the fear, so assuaging the fear is increasingly out of the question, is it not?
Try instead not to manufacture enemies. You created bin Laden to strike at the Soviets in Afghanistan in the seventies, who claimed they were there to stem the rise of militant Islam. They were right and you were wrong. You invaded Afghanistan to strike at al Queda, even though they left long before you bombed the country. You annihilated Iraq, then turned it into a occupied prison state. You are now surrounding Iran with two carrier groups and tried to add a third, but the Navy refused to cooperate. If you bomb them, 90 million people will take up arms against you, and yes, all the attacks you tell your people to fear will then become very real. Mission Accompished, indeed.
We can't help you. You are your own enemy, and you will never defeat yourself. Try shattering the mirror.
Emp. Encryption has a shelf life, not that I'm terribly worried about the RNC reading my archives. Encrypted files will be decrypted using future technology much faster than we think the breakthroughs will come. I'm also not worried about my data being "stolen", as it is on a foreign server and is therefore theirs. What I wonder, rhetorically, is if they claim ownership over the bits on their server. It's a trick question, as the answer is "yes", firstly, and even if it were not, the terms of your contract with Google gives them the option of changing the terms at their pleasure. So, good place to stash your artwork, not so good your email archives and chat logs. Young Americans grew up with no idea of privacy at home or in school, so it's hard to make the point about the lack of it.
Q for you: what does Fission give you that Audacity doesn't? I like their software, but I don't see the need for Fission when I've Audacity. Other than stripping the MP4's of their spydata, of course.
They were waiting for Steve Jobs' birthday.
Human rights transcend contract law. You can't sign away the right not to be falsely accused of pedophilia. Corporate person or real person, contract law has limits.
Somewhere in the vast wasteland of your software licenses, some joker may have inserted the right of his company to adopt your children against your will. Ha ha, you clicked through.
Q: Does Google claim to own the rights to access the data, or even to own the data? And they do hand it over to warrantless searches by secret police types, not so? Not asking idly; I tend not to use "free" services as they claim to own the data I upload.
Because they'll make it a suspension offense to disguise or refuse to carry a tracker. And they could just install them *in your textbooks* or your very prominent name tag which you are required to wear at all times proudly on your chest where they can verify that you are in compliance. And if you play games with the tag by passing it around or clipping it to a cat, then yet again a suspension offense. And if the frog boils as well as it has been, eventually it'll be a criminal offense. They'll think of a way. Theft or unauthorized use of school property, or some other excuse. Ditto all this for your job, or living in a homeowners association, or a gated community, or working for the government.
Don't go off so much on government; you can change a government. Watch what the private entities do with the information. Watch all these "private equity" partnerships that have suddenly sprung up, buying everything in sight, taking companies private, and are not answerable to the SEC or stockholders. Things are happening. Fear those men, for you'll never know who or where they are.
Just had a sad, devious thought: it's legal for a third party corporation to buy access to real-time data tracking GPS coordinates of cell phone users, but the government needs a warrant. Ohhhhhh. Sick. That "silly oversight" of letting private entities buy access makes sense -- the Bushies simply let a private operator track the data, then they tap the operator to track citizens, under the table when they want, and somehow think they are getting around the laws requiring warrants to obtain permission to spy on "criminals". Damn. They've used this shell game in other matters to get around laws. So obvious.
All cell phones made and sold after 2005 have GPS trackers built-in, and can report their location to the meter to the carrier, second-by-second, whether the owner wishes it so or no. Little known fact: that tracking data is available to third parties for a fee. Anyone with a newer phone is already part of the New World Order, as George's dad named it. Just a matter of flicking a software switch in the phone, so opting out via the phone's menu isn't worth spit.
And NO, using the cell towers to triangulate isn't the same. They didn't keep logs, it was imprecise, and rare. Now it is acceptable to track everyone constantly, and no one even notices.
That's the water approaching full boil, silly frogs.
" Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
WOAH. False Choice fallacy winner here.
"A think tank" study, eh? I don't have to look at the name, as I can guess. Lissen up; the "think tanks" are really, REALLY well funded right wing propoganda outlets dressed up as friendly wonks. Who's picking up the tab for this "think tank" study? Would that group have a deep interest in reaming us bloody with corporatized, right-sized monopoly services? Uh-yap. Damned near all of the "think tanks" are deeply married to the very wealthy. Their agenda is the ascendancy of their spouse.
The muni services have been litigated to death, and those few who managed to survive are throttled for funds by friendly neighborhood lobbyists working the local governments. What few, very few experiments that exist managed to survive by partnering with some corporation like Google, which kinda isn't exactly a municipal wifi network, but yet another granted monopoly.
Years back I totalled up what Americans have spent on their "free market" net connections. The figure is enormous. I then calculated, on the high side, what it would have cost for the Feds to fiber up every town in the country, Interstate Highway style. I never hear people complain about the highway system, even tho it's cost trillions in adjusted dollars over the last half century and literally rode over local governments. It's not even close. We could have had fiber to the house for a fraction of what we've been screwed for, and for a hell of a lot less than what they are about to screw us for in perpetuity.
Now, we don't even need the fiber to the home; we could build municipal fiber backbones with wifi nodes and even cat5 connections to the citizens. We could do it for, what, a few tens of billions of dollars? And then it would be done but for the maintenance costs. And we'd not have to spend 25-100 bucks - each - a month for crap service. We'd have gigabit to the home or megabit to the air. If we didn't want to make it a "market" system, we could make it free, anonymous, and as capacious as we liked. We don't do it that way for ideological reasons.
The "free market" thinktanks want to hold us upside down and shake the change out of our pockets. They aren't anyone's friends but their investor buddies'.
Ah, but hydrogen requires production, distribution, and sales, therefore: the oil companies can buy themselves a hydrogen-based economy much like the oil-based one they now own. Hydrogen=profit.
Solar cells on roof of house, or square miles of them in a desert, generating power for electric cars on a grid, burning nothing, distributing nothing, is a model for an economy that will depress their profits a bit. Thus it will not be, not if they have to buy every patent on solar power and battery/capacitor storage in existence. With hundred billion in total profits to spend each quarter, it's just a matter of when they feel like getting around to it.
""Free speech" refers to a prohibition on censorship by the government;"
No. A corporation can censor. It just did. I can dig up a definition if you like. And a corporation is not a god-like being beholden to none. The owners might like to think so, but no.
what child porn on the net? how do you know it's there? you ever look? no? who told you, then? ever consider the idea it's not there? that this is this generation's communist plot to take over America, or that Satanists killed ten thousand babies in Mississippi?
it isn't there, people! they are lying or exaggerating whatever little is out there to cow us into accepting surveillance on the net. you won't look, 'cause it's wrong and the FBI is monitoring Google to catch you doing it. so it's just the FBI and the other more spookier surveillance types telling us it's there. and we swallow the lie.
and consider the power the spooks have now: all they need do to nail a political opponent is say he looked at kiddy porn. Bush's people already pulled that stunt on one of their most honorable opponents, former marine Scott Ritter, weapons inspector, who insisted bush was lying in 2001. he was arrested for kid porn, and he was no longer welcome on TV or the papers. they then dropped the charges, no explanation. bang. rep dead. anyone else want to embarrass bush or cheney? want to be a kiddy porn trafficker on tomorrow's news? message received.
How does "everyone know" kiddie porn is out there unless they've been looking for it? It's one of those things "everyone knows", like the communist infiltration of America and all those terrorist cells "everyone knew" were ready to spring into action in 2001.
I wonder how they're gonna build all those prisons?
Ah, YES. We ARE in prison. Everyone on probation or life arrest, GPS phone tracked, huge fines paid every month for the rest of their lives, rest of the money for lawyers and government monitoring fees. You status as a criminal or non-criminal is just a boolean assignment. They don't need to lock you up. They merely need to change the intensity of the monitoring already you live with. Keep you from ever working a real job again. Keep you from voting, ever again. Impoverish you.
I really know nothing of all the bullet and assassin theories. But I do know this: damned odd that a mob nightclub owner just wanders up and pops one into Oswald in front of God and Country for no damned reason at all. Killing your patsy is an old, old way of covering tracks, and the CIA/Cuban Plumber hacks specialized old school idiot schemes. Apparently Robert Kennedy agreed; it was obvious they'd have the motives and means. He IDed the CIA/Castro nuts as the ones who did it, but was helpless as he lost his job as AG when his brother was killed. He was set to start a real investigation when he became President. Then another weirdo popped up and killed him. Game over, insert quarter.
You are not mistaken. If you piss them off, or somehow are identified as a potential terrorist, you will disappear. This is not an exaggeration. A lot of people are missing. At least Padilla has a kangaroo trial right now. He won't win, of course, because by the rules he can't defend himself by confronting witnesses or examining evidence. And it can happen to you.
I won't fly. I swear to Chthulu, if the time comes to leave, I'm walking to Canada. I'll straighten it out after I make it to a town, but I will not fly, drive, or ride a plane or ship. Too damned risky.
I'd like anyone who's not living in the US, US citizen or not, to answer questions I don't see asked often:
How does it work in your country? Worse? Better? Is it legal to require background checks, political tests, Google searches, drug screening, the Infamous Anal Cavity Search to get a job in your country? I'd guess positions of security would require some of those, of course, but how about you folk who just want a Plain Job? And how about you US types working and living abroad: do you have to put up with all this where you are parked, if you don't work for a US corporation?
If we don't want criminals holding positions of security, or even to hold a job, how do you explain the reluctance to discuss George Bush Jr.'s DUI arrest, cocaine and drug use, or desertion in time of war? If we can't get a job without FBI checks and anal cavity searches, how does Fortunate Son get away with it?
After a certain income is achieved, do we get to forgo background checks? Seems like it.