The tendency of government to increase its power given the opportunity. Terrorism only provided the OPPORTUNITY to pass measures like the "PATRIOT" Act--it did NOT provide the will to do so.
Since terrorism tends to provide opportunities to governments why should anyone expect governments to be interested in effective terrorism prevention?
As a soldier in Iraq, I've witnessed how necessary good intelligence is in conducting asymmetrical warfare firsthand.
As a soldier in Iraq you are part of an invading army,
The terrorists might have the asymmetrical advantage of fanatical suicide bombers,
Asuming you are still talking about Iraq many of your so called "terrorists" are actually "resistance" and "militiamen".
but we have the asymmetrical advantage of technological capabilities that can intercept their plans.
Only if they are daft enough to use methods of communication which are vulnerable to mass interception of electronic telecommunications in North America and Western Europe.
Your in some delusion to think terrorism is impossible or improbable. It's inevitable without the very measures we have employed since September 12th that you are fighting so hard to undo.
What exactly did the US Government change on that date? Which specific activities started or stopped on that date? If anything we just have "more of the same"...
Just being an asshole isn't in and of itself illegal. People's ability to do legal things - even when those things are distasteful to most - should be protected.
As with unpopular and politically incorrect speach this tends to be where people's freedoms activly need protecting.
This is the only way to prevent government abuse of these cameras. If the public has full acess to the cameras then government/police can't bury images they don't like.
If cameras do monitor public spaces it should be the law that ANY citizen can see both the live images and any stored images at any time.
You'd also need to have some way to be sure that such cameras couldn't be easily disabled, by either the authorities or random criminals. Any police officers prepared to assault members of the public are hardly going to be adverse to vandalising some cameras...
And yes, "Who's watching the watchers" is the important question. And funnily enough, the watchers often aren't comfortable with the idea of being watched themselves.....
Now, think about this: Do you really notice those cameras at the bank, in the bus or train or whereever they have been for a while? - Well, here in Denmark almost all trains and buses are equipped with cameras in order to prevent vandalism, and people just don't notice them anymore. This includes the vandals like the bozo who tagged away at the back of a bus on the way to his school. The camera caught it all including where he got off the bus. A few days later he was identified by his principal and billed for the damages (as alternative to fighting it in court).
Maybe these work better in Denmark. In London the CCTV system on a bus failed to record anything when someone placed a bomb on one last summer.
It is impossible to enter a bus or a train or train station without being recorded and this cuts down a lot on the crimes committed there - and help solve crimes elsewhere as well. We've had murderers and rapists caught on tape, providing a timestamp and location fix that kills fake alibis and even show the the rape victim and her stalker just prior to the rape.
However in London cameras didn't appear to be much help to an innocent man gunned down by police.
For the amount it would cost to equip a city with CCTV coverage, the authorities could afford enough extra front-line officers to make a real difference to crime figures. But all they are concerned about is image. PCs {in the "police constable" sense} aren't high-tech enough for them, and furthermore would constitute a roundabout admission of failure -- since they could have been deployed a long time ago, before CCTV technology reached the state it has today, and still had more effect than any fancy camera wizardry.
Also more police is less likely to be the "double edged sword" that this type of CCTV could turn out to be. Since being able to access CCTV could be highly useful to criminals and a machine can't judge the intent of a person.
If the "experiment" is not universally opposed, the government will find a way to take it nationwide. The more affluent areas of every city will be filled with cameras that anyone can monitor.
What are the odds these cameras will fail if there is any chance they will show the likes of police officers committing crimes though...
I mean, the US is based on equality. Might as well invade everyone's privacy equally, right?
Except that the privacy invasion generally isn't equal. Typically those calling for and doing the spying don't get their privacy invaded at all.
But don't worry, the US Government would never abuse that information! That would be unethical.
"Government ethics" is rather an oxymoron. Anyway even if you trust the US Government do you trust everyone the US Government trusts? How about any entity sucessfully spying on or infiltrating the US Government...
It's strange these companies can't afford to set up a few of their own NTP servers instead of overloading servers that don't have the bandwidth. It it's because they are clueless or they are cheap?
They could use "pool.ntp.org", which is probably cheaper than the effort they currently put into finding NTP servers. Even better, set up some of their own and add them to the pool...
I have a better suggestion. Label them with the names of various movies. That way, when they are determined in court to be blanks, you will have made royal asses out of them.
Even better find some movie titles which also have meanings in non-movie related contexts.
It's also an illustration of one of the common laments of satirists: Writing satire is difficult, because the people that you're trying to mock satirize keep doing things far more outrageous than anything you've thought up.
Or they will treat any satire/parody as a goal. Indeed some people and groups are more or less immune to being made fun of because of this effect.
Just because the cost per unit is zero, doesn't mean that the creators forfeit all rights to a ROI.
Why should they have any rights in the first place?
It still cost money to make the damn thing, cover the losses from all the shit music people don't buy.
How is that different from any other business. If you filled a shop with goods no-one wanted to buy should some entity be obliged to help you avoid going bankrupt...
I propose a scale of decreasing cost over time, with the work becoming public domain after a certain amount of revenue.
There are all sorts of accounting tricks which can be used here. A simpler option would be to go back the idea of things becoming public domain a fixed period of time after first publication. Not only is this difficult to fiddle it also enables copyright libraries to work.
Because that trade association is comprised of approximately 5 large companies that together account for over 90% of the market for all media in the western, and most of the eastern, world.
That makes them an oligopoly, who is just as cut-throat and abusive as his neighbor, monopoly.
Or alternativly they are a cartel.
That's tantamount to asking if it is up to Boeing and Airbus to decide if they agree with gravity and want to make planes that work with gravity or if they should purchase a law that makes gravity illegal instead.
The difference here is that the customers of Boeing and Airbus tend themselves to be large corporations, with a trade association.
It is human nature to make copies of stuff we like. People have been making mix-tapes since they first invented reel-to-reel recorders and people have been making copies of books since pen and ink were first invented.
For a long time the only way to get a copy of a book was using a pen and ink. Thus you'd have to be either very patient, rich or both.
Now that the tools to make millions of digital copies for effectively no cost at all are in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, trying to outlaw human nature's desire to copy is like outlawing gravity.
It isn't just simple copying there is also "remixing" and creation of derived works, e.g. "fan fiction".
An unenforceable law is a plague and a cancer. It spreads fear and encourages contempt for the law.
Including amongst those ment to be enforcing the law.
Attempts to enforce an unenforceable law lead to the DMCA, the War on Drugs Used By Nonwhite People, and the like.
Most dangerous being corrupt cops, gangsters with a "badge" are even more dangerous to the public than the regular kind.
The burden of copyright didn't show up when you needed a press more expensive than a house to publish a book. Suppose it's 1940 and suppose I don't know the real numbers so I gasify that a book costs $2 to print and $.05 in royalties. The royalties don't stop publication. Fast forward to now. What does it cost to move an ebook from New York to Los Angeles?
Not only is the cost to move said ebook minute it also dosn't depend on distance, whereas distance does tend to be a factor in the cost of moving physical objects around.
What happens when someone demands a fifty-cent royalty? That poor ebook probably doesn't get out on the Internet.
Especially if the publisher expects people in Spain to pay half a Euro, rather than 40 cents.
You hit the nail on the head - back when the social compact of copyright was created - we, the people, did not give up much on our end of the bargain. Since, as you said, it wasn't easy to make copies back then, so giving up the inherent natural right to make copies was no big deal.
There's also another factor at work, copyright didn't really impinge on popular entertainment and culture in the 17th and 18th centuries in the first place.
Now that copying is easy for anyone and everyone, that bargain is no longer so favorable to us, the people and we want to renegotiate.
The problem is, the entrenched copyright cartel thinks they don't have to renegotiate, that they can just dictate terms.
They are perfectly happy, however, to keep changing the terms themselves. Copyright has vastly grown both in scope and term length. The "bargin" being offered in the 21st century would still be considerably different from that of even the early 20th or 19th centuries even without most "plebs" having the ability to copy and distribute "content".
You have completely missunderstood the purpose of copyright and give undue importance to all the wrong things. If the goal of copyright is to make money for publishers, your reasoning is correct. If the goal of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", you are wrong.
The possibility of financial reward being a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
The original term of US copyrights was 14 years, despite the tremendous cost of publishing at the time.
Communications have also greatly improved since the 18th century, which is argument for a shorter term that 14 years.
The goal is to spread information and culture, not to make sure a bunch of greedheads have money. As the cost of that spread declines, the time required to recoup costs diminishes and vanishes.
Problem is that the original goal appears to have been ignored/forgotten.
The spirit of America is that you are free to do what you want but no one owes you a living.
Some "people" do believe they are owed a living, especially large "corporate people"...
They seek to perpetuate an empire of control based on the technical limitations of 20th century broadcast and recording technology and a great deal of racketeering. Without RIAA only stores, selling junk sampled on the nations three radio networks, the world's big three music publishers start to look as good or worse than any other music publisher. Musicians and artists would then be able to market themselves freely and keep more of their earnings and the industry would collapse. Make no mistake at the level of control they seek with DRM and broadcast flags.
There's also "region coding" to add into the mix. The basic idea appears to be to try and impose the limitations of older technology onto current.
That's a viewpoint I hear all the time, and I must confess that I'm completely mystified by it. Do people who believe this think the government will never abuse it's power?
Governments are not even single entities in this respect. They tend to have all sorts of semi-autonymouse departments as well as containing corrupt/criminal individuals with huge power at their disposal.
They're abusing their power right now and have many times before -- that's true of almost every government in human hisotry.
Historically governments tend to consider political opponents a much greater threat than criminals/terrorists in general.
You'd have nothing to fear when doing nothing wrong only if the government was completely honest. The more power they have the more they'll abuse it, as they keep proving every day.
Not only does "power corrupt" it also tends to be the case that power attracts the corrupt.
He had a vague memory of university professors (circa 1980) being scornful of some of the new skyscrapers for not having enough 'safety net' in the load bearing department. The specific scenario he could remember involved some Houston-area skyscrapers built in the late 1970's, and the new 757 or 767 then entering service.
The WTC designers used a 707 for their modeling of a plane collision, possibly they may even have considered a fully fueled 747 taking off from one of the 3 airports near Manhatten.
Guess what happened?
Did the building initally withstand the impact then crumble several 10's of minutes later... In the process turning all the concrete in the building into dust?
Would like to make one more logical point: Do we know who actually attacked us on 9/11/01???? This nation appears to be taking the word of the Bush Administration - which has been proven to have been lying about everything else!!!
At least part of the conspiracy theory pushed by the US Government is fairly trivial to debunk. Several of the "hijackers" turned up alive (and nowhere near the US) after the event. Which means that all of the 19 names are suspect. There's also "evidence" which looks highly likely to have been planted, "hijackers" going out of their way to be noticed and various anomolies in the passenger/crew lists. It isn't just the identities (and number of) hijackers which looks highly bogus there are also several other problems with the whole story.
One of many problems with secret searches is understanding what we're getting in exchange? Are we really any safer?
Even if you can demonstrate corrollation can you demonstrate causation. Maybe some other factor increased safety, it's even possible that the "secret searches" reduced safety but that unknown overshadowed it.
Cheney likes to point to the fact that we haven't been attacked since 9-11 as proof the administration is effective, conveniently overlooking that it was almost ten years between attacks on the trade center when we didn't do much of anything. It proves nothing.
The basic problem is that terrorist attacks (of the 9-11 kind) are very uncommon events. Indeed terrorist attacks of any kind are quite uncommon.
Judging by the war in Iraq
Which includes all sorts of embezelment related to "reconstruction contracts" as well as failing to provide soldiers with the equiptment they need.
bungled response to Katrina,
Including officials ment to be helping the public obstructing rescue attempts for the sake of their own egos.
the military wholesale spying on US citizens
Dispite NORAD's utter failure on the 11th September 2001 people in charge were actually promoted.
the Justice Dept. all but admitting AT&T is helping them monitor communications in America, bankrupting the budget and the endless lies how are we supposed to trust that the government is doing the right thing?
The logical conclusion are that these "leaders" are complete incompetents who routinely lie to attempt to cover their ineptitude.
I think it's pretty safe to assume this expansion of police powers does not make us any safer.
At best it will make things no less safe. Remember that someone gunned down by a gang of cops is likely to be just as dead as someone blown up by a terrorist bomb and there tend to be a lot more police carrying guns around than nutters with backpacks full of acetone peroxide.
It's a waste of resources, it's intrusive, and further undermines the pitiful remnants of our civil rights.
Also likely to take money away from either existing or possible methods of law enforcement which actually do a decent job of protecting people.
Wouldn't it be more convenient to round up random muslims, claim they're "terrorists" and hold them indefinitely in some foreign country to show that you're doing something about this whole terrorism thing?
Rather safer for those doing the "rounding up" to first make sure that they avoid any actual terrorists or indeed anyone who might be reasonably well armed.
Slashdot Mirror
The tendency of government to increase its power given the opportunity. Terrorism only provided the OPPORTUNITY to pass measures like the "PATRIOT" Act--it did NOT provide the will to do so.
Since terrorism tends to provide opportunities to governments why should anyone expect governments to be interested in effective terrorism prevention?
As a soldier in Iraq, I've witnessed how necessary good intelligence is in conducting asymmetrical warfare firsthand.
As a soldier in Iraq you are part of an invading army,
The terrorists might have the asymmetrical advantage of fanatical suicide bombers,
Asuming you are still talking about Iraq many of your so called "terrorists" are actually "resistance" and "militiamen".
but we have the asymmetrical advantage of technological capabilities that can intercept their plans.
Only if they are daft enough to use methods of communication which are vulnerable to mass interception of electronic telecommunications in North America and Western Europe.
Your in some delusion to think terrorism is impossible or improbable. It's inevitable without the very measures we have employed since September 12th that you are fighting so hard to undo.
What exactly did the US Government change on that date? Which specific activities started or stopped on that date? If anything we just have "more of the same"...
Just being an asshole isn't in and of itself illegal. People's ability to do legal things - even when those things are distasteful to most - should be protected.
As with unpopular and politically incorrect speach this tends to be where people's freedoms activly need protecting.
This is the only way to prevent government abuse of these cameras. If the public has full acess to the cameras then government/police can't bury images they don't like.
If cameras do monitor public spaces it should be the law that ANY citizen can see both the live images and any stored images at any time.
You'd also need to have some way to be sure that such cameras couldn't be easily disabled, by either the authorities or random criminals. Any police officers prepared to assault members of the public are hardly going to be adverse to vandalising some cameras...
And yes, "Who's watching the watchers" is the important question. And funnily enough, the watchers often aren't comfortable with the idea of being watched themselves .....
Especially if it's by the "plebs".
Now, think about this: Do you really notice those cameras at the bank, in the bus or train or whereever they have been for a while? - Well, here in Denmark almost all trains and buses are equipped with cameras in order to prevent vandalism, and people just don't notice them anymore. This includes the vandals like the bozo who tagged away at the back of a bus on the way to his school. The camera caught it all including where he got off the bus. A few days later he was identified by his principal and billed for the damages (as alternative to fighting it in court).
Maybe these work better in Denmark. In London the CCTV system on a bus failed to record anything when someone placed a bomb on one last summer.
It is impossible to enter a bus or a train or train station without being recorded and this cuts down a lot on the crimes committed there - and help solve crimes elsewhere as well. We've had murderers and rapists caught on tape, providing a timestamp and location fix that kills fake alibis and even show the the rape victim and her stalker just prior to the rape.
However in London cameras didn't appear to be much help to an innocent man gunned down by police.
For the amount it would cost to equip a city with CCTV coverage, the authorities could afford enough extra front-line officers to make a real difference to crime figures. But all they are concerned about is image. PCs {in the "police constable" sense} aren't high-tech enough for them, and furthermore would constitute a roundabout admission of failure -- since they could have been deployed a long time ago, before CCTV technology reached the state it has today, and still had more effect than any fancy camera wizardry.
Also more police is less likely to be the "double edged sword" that this type of CCTV could turn out to be. Since being able to access CCTV could be highly useful to criminals and a machine can't judge the intent of a person.
If the "experiment" is not universally opposed, the government will find a way to take it nationwide. The more affluent areas of every city will be filled with cameras that anyone can monitor.
What are the odds these cameras will fail if there is any chance they will show the likes of police officers committing crimes though...
I mean, the US is based on equality. Might as well invade everyone's privacy equally, right?
Except that the privacy invasion generally isn't equal. Typically those calling for and doing the spying don't get their privacy invaded at all.
But don't worry, the US Government would never abuse that information! That would be unethical.
"Government ethics" is rather an oxymoron. Anyway even if you trust the US Government do you trust everyone the US Government trusts? How about any entity sucessfully spying on or infiltrating the US Government...
It's strange these companies can't afford to set up a few of their own NTP servers instead of overloading servers that don't have the bandwidth. It it's because they are clueless or they are cheap?
They could use "pool.ntp.org", which is probably cheaper than the effort they currently put into finding NTP servers. Even better, set up some of their own and add them to the pool...
I have a better suggestion. Label them with the names of various movies. That way, when they are determined in court to be blanks, you will have made royal asses out of them.
Even better find some movie titles which also have meanings in non-movie related contexts.
It's also an illustration of one of the common laments of satirists: Writing satire is difficult, because the people that you're trying to mock satirize keep doing things far more outrageous than anything you've thought up.
Or they will treat any satire/parody as a goal. Indeed some people and groups are more or less immune to being made fun of because of this effect.
Just because the cost per unit is zero, doesn't mean that the creators forfeit all rights to a ROI.
Why should they have any rights in the first place?
It still cost money to make the damn thing, cover the losses from all the shit music people don't buy.
How is that different from any other business. If you filled a shop with goods no-one wanted to buy should some entity be obliged to help you avoid going bankrupt...
I propose a scale of decreasing cost over time, with the work becoming public domain after a certain amount of revenue.
There are all sorts of accounting tricks which can be used here. A simpler option would be to go back the idea of things becoming public domain a fixed period of time after first publication. Not only is this difficult to fiddle it also enables copyright libraries to work.
Because that trade association is comprised of approximately 5 large companies that together account for over 90% of the market for all media in the western, and most of the eastern, world.
That makes them an oligopoly, who is just as cut-throat and abusive as his neighbor, monopoly.
Or alternativly they are a cartel.
That's tantamount to asking if it is up to Boeing and Airbus to decide if they agree with gravity and want to make planes that work with gravity or if they should purchase a law that makes gravity illegal instead.
The difference here is that the customers of Boeing and Airbus tend themselves to be large corporations, with a trade association.
It is human nature to make copies of stuff we like. People have been making mix-tapes since they first invented reel-to-reel recorders and people have been making copies of books since pen and ink were first invented.
For a long time the only way to get a copy of a book was using a pen and ink. Thus you'd have to be either very patient, rich or both.
Now that the tools to make millions of digital copies for effectively no cost at all are in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, trying to outlaw human nature's desire to copy is like outlawing gravity.
It isn't just simple copying there is also "remixing" and creation of derived works, e.g. "fan fiction".
An unenforceable law is a plague and a cancer. It spreads fear and encourages contempt for the law.
Including amongst those ment to be enforcing the law.
Attempts to enforce an unenforceable law lead to the DMCA, the War on Drugs Used By Nonwhite People, and the like.
Most dangerous being corrupt cops, gangsters with a "badge" are even more dangerous to the public than the regular kind.
The burden of copyright didn't show up when you needed a press more expensive than a house to publish a book. Suppose it's 1940 and suppose I don't know the real numbers so I gasify that a book costs $2 to print and $.05 in royalties. The royalties don't stop publication. Fast forward to now. What does it cost to move an ebook from New York to Los Angeles?
Not only is the cost to move said ebook minute it also dosn't depend on distance, whereas distance does tend to be a factor in the cost of moving physical objects around.
What happens when someone demands a fifty-cent royalty? That poor ebook probably doesn't get out on the Internet.
Especially if the publisher expects people in Spain to pay half a Euro, rather than 40 cents.
You hit the nail on the head - back when the social compact of copyright was created - we, the people, did not give up much on our end of the bargain. Since, as you said, it wasn't easy to make copies back then, so giving up the inherent natural right to make copies was no big deal.
There's also another factor at work, copyright didn't really impinge on popular entertainment and culture in the 17th and 18th centuries in the first place.
Now that copying is easy for anyone and everyone, that bargain is no longer so favorable to us, the people and we want to renegotiate. The problem is, the entrenched copyright cartel thinks they don't have to renegotiate, that they can just dictate terms.
They are perfectly happy, however, to keep changing the terms themselves. Copyright has vastly grown both in scope and term length. The "bargin" being offered in the 21st century would still be considerably different from that of even the early 20th or 19th centuries even without most "plebs" having the ability to copy and distribute "content".
You have completely missunderstood the purpose of copyright and give undue importance to all the wrong things. If the goal of copyright is to make money for publishers, your reasoning is correct. If the goal of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", you are wrong.
The possibility of financial reward being a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
The original term of US copyrights was 14 years, despite the tremendous cost of publishing at the time.
Communications have also greatly improved since the 18th century, which is argument for a shorter term that 14 years.
The goal is to spread information and culture, not to make sure a bunch of greedheads have money. As the cost of that spread declines, the time required to recoup costs diminishes and vanishes.
Problem is that the original goal appears to have been ignored/forgotten.
The spirit of America is that you are free to do what you want but no one owes you a living.
Some "people" do believe they are owed a living, especially large "corporate people"...
They seek to perpetuate an empire of control based on the technical limitations of 20th century broadcast and recording technology and a great deal of racketeering. Without RIAA only stores, selling junk sampled on the nations three radio networks, the world's big three music publishers start to look as good or worse than any other music publisher. Musicians and artists would then be able to market themselves freely and keep more of their earnings and the industry would collapse. Make no mistake at the level of control they seek with DRM and broadcast flags.
There's also "region coding" to add into the mix. The basic idea appears to be to try and impose the limitations of older technology onto current.
That's a viewpoint I hear all the time, and I must confess that I'm completely mystified by it. Do people who believe this think the government will never abuse it's power?
Governments are not even single entities in this respect. They tend to have all sorts of semi-autonymouse departments as well as containing corrupt/criminal individuals with huge power at their disposal.
They're abusing their power right now and have many times before -- that's true of almost every government in human hisotry.
Historically governments tend to consider political opponents a much greater threat than criminals/terrorists in general.
You'd have nothing to fear when doing nothing wrong only if the government was completely honest. The more power they have the more they'll abuse it, as they keep proving every day.
Not only does "power corrupt" it also tends to be the case that power attracts the corrupt.
We WERE attacked after 9/11. Am I the only person who remembers the Anthrax attacks on Congress?
What is even more interesting is the lack of effort the US Government has put into persuing the person who appears to be the best suspect...
He had a vague memory of university professors (circa 1980) being scornful of some of the new skyscrapers for not having enough 'safety net' in the load bearing department. The specific scenario he could remember involved some Houston-area skyscrapers built in the late 1970's, and the new 757 or 767 then entering service.
The WTC designers used a 707 for their modeling of a plane collision, possibly they may even have considered a fully fueled 747 taking off from one of the 3 airports near Manhatten.
Guess what happened?
Did the building initally withstand the impact then crumble several 10's of minutes later... In the process turning all the concrete in the building into dust?
It doesn't require thousands of peoples.
An interesting theory would be one which involved less people "in the know" than the Osama nonsense.
Would like to make one more logical point: Do we know who actually attacked us on 9/11/01???? This nation appears to be taking the word of the Bush Administration - which has been proven to have been lying about everything else!!!
At least part of the conspiracy theory pushed by the US Government is fairly trivial to debunk. Several of the "hijackers" turned up alive (and nowhere near the US) after the event. Which means that all of the 19 names are suspect. There's also "evidence" which looks highly likely to have been planted, "hijackers" going out of their way to be noticed and various anomolies in the passenger/crew lists.
It isn't just the identities (and number of) hijackers which looks highly bogus there are also several other problems with the whole story.
One of many problems with secret searches is understanding what we're getting in exchange? Are we really any safer?
Even if you can demonstrate corrollation can you demonstrate causation. Maybe some other factor increased safety, it's even possible that the "secret searches" reduced safety but that unknown overshadowed it.
Cheney likes to point to the fact that we haven't been attacked since 9-11 as proof the administration is effective, conveniently overlooking that it was almost ten years between attacks on the trade center when we didn't do much of anything. It proves nothing.
The basic problem is that terrorist attacks (of the 9-11 kind) are very uncommon events. Indeed terrorist attacks of any kind are quite uncommon.
Judging by the war in Iraq
Which includes all sorts of embezelment related to "reconstruction contracts" as well as failing to provide soldiers with the equiptment they need.
bungled response to Katrina,
Including officials ment to be helping the public obstructing rescue attempts for the sake of their own egos.
the military wholesale spying on US citizens
Dispite NORAD's utter failure on the 11th September 2001 people in charge were actually promoted.
the Justice Dept. all but admitting AT&T is helping them monitor communications in America, bankrupting the budget and the endless lies how are we supposed to trust that the government is doing the right thing?
The logical conclusion are that these "leaders" are complete incompetents who routinely lie to attempt to cover their ineptitude.
I think it's pretty safe to assume this expansion of police powers does not make us any safer.
At best it will make things no less safe. Remember that someone gunned down by a gang of cops is likely to be just as dead as someone blown up by a terrorist bomb and there tend to be a lot more police carrying guns around than nutters with backpacks full of acetone peroxide.
It's a waste of resources, it's intrusive, and further undermines the pitiful remnants of our civil rights.
Also likely to take money away from either existing or possible methods of law enforcement which actually do a decent job of protecting people.
Wouldn't it be more convenient to round up random muslims, claim they're "terrorists" and hold them indefinitely in some foreign country to show that you're doing something about this whole terrorism thing?
Rather safer for those doing the "rounding up" to first make sure that they avoid any actual terrorists or indeed anyone who might be reasonably well armed.
No; the problem is that when we give up our basic freedoms to catch criminals trying to take away our freedoms, the criminals get what they want.
It's also unclear if this giving up of freedoms actually does much to catch said criminals in the first place.
There are plenty of legal criminal-justice procedures that can catch the bad guys without making the United States into a police state.
Which may even be considerably more effective act actually catching the "bad guys", including such basics as keeping them out of law enforcement...