Re:It's good to see everyone's getting back to nor
on
Carnivore Update
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· Score: 1
Noone will see this, but...
EVERYONE is worried about the unstated concern that the international organizations are really just fronts for foreign governments.
Just a thought, but it may be relevant that to 95.4% of the world's population, that foreign government is yours. And the US government has itself said -- and proved in action -- that if UN resolutions are inconvenient, then they will be ignored in favour of whatever action the US government deems appropriate or expedient.
Saying 'but we're the good guys!' over and over will not make it so. Consider all the wars of invasion and intimidation over the last 50 years (Panama, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Libya, etc), all on demonised 'not-quite humans'. Consider the overt and unashamed US support of such 'democrats' as Suharto in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philipines, Just about everyone in Central America and (formerly) Qaddafi, Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden.
This is not to say that the US is satan incarnate, and everyone else are angels. People can, and do, do things every day to each other that are horrible and sickening. My own country, Australia, was complicit in the invasion, occupation and attempted genocide in East Timor.
But most other players in the game do not have military budgets measured in multiple billions.
It's not just that the US government does these things (though that is bad enough), it is that these things are done with impunity.
Trivial but emblematic example: assuming that the string you are being sent will stay below a certain size means you don't need boundary checking. Congratulations! You have just made the main loop faster by orders of magnitude and much more human-readable!
Oops... buffer overflow attack!
But, but, but the code was simple! Its not my fault!
Kiddy porn isn't illegal on "The Internet" so it's fine to do it there. Right? Of course not!
Bad analogy
Can we say that Kiddy pr0nographers are the new Nazis... anyone who compares something they don't like to Kiddy Pr0n without good reason can be assumed to be beyond rational argument?
Try more the analogy of a website that displays softporn, you know -- nipples and maybe a peek of pubic hair. This is legal in most western countries (as far as I know). Someone downloads this to Japan, where (again, afaik) images of pubic hair are illegal. (This is the nation that produced the popular (in Japan) manga 'RapeMan', but that is another story.) Can this purveyor of filth be extradited from the US, GB or Australia to Japan because they broke a law which they had no way of knowing even existed?
The Dickensian years of the Industrial Revolution weren't all bad... after all, was it not the massive poverty and high artificial crime (stealing bread in order to feed a family of 12, etc.) rate that 'encouraged' people to move to the colonies? Was it not England's masterful management of a small disease isolated to one species of potato that 'encouraged' the Irish diaspora?
Hey, without the Industrial Revolution, and its consequent industrial-scale human suffering, Australia might not exist! And neither would the (fast fading) memory of world-famous Australian socialist policies like free universal education, yea, even unto University, and free universal medical coverage.
But hey, with policies and practices that Dickens knew and... loved coming back, what a great opportunity for another Diaspora!
...'netizens downloading pirate movies would utilize 84% of *all* US internet bandwidth.
... which is a lot, when you consider that pr0nography takes up at least 48% of bandwidth now, followed by 27.5% going to unnecessary and vapid streaming video net-conferences and most of the rest of the bandwidth going to Windows XP telling MS about the contents of people's hard drives.
Umm, is it just me, or is the Internet(TM) being taken away from us, piece by piece?
More to the point, is it just me, or is the US govt, in conjunction with the Zaibatsus (hi, Bill!), expressing more and more interest in being able to say who can and cannot play in what had been made into a global sandpit?
Wait... thought coming into mind...
#ifdef RANT
The way any power structure exercises power is to control who can and cannot do x. When the powers are comfortable in their authority and control, then restrictions are unnecessary, and therefore few. The more the powers get frightened that their control may be slipping, the more controls are instituted. The ultimate sanction is execution ('Thou shalt not kill' circumvented by defining lawful killing != murder. Think about this: execution == lawful murder). On the net, extreme sanction is denying the priviledge of being allowed to interface with dangerous thoughts. This means censorship, nannyware, great firewalls, Passport(TM) and now this.
The internet was built by people, not governments, although governments are responsible for allowing access to the internet (mainly through infrastructure -- phone lines and international pipes), although privatisation increasingly means that even this has been taken out of their hands (with a sigh of relief on their part, usually).
But now, even the saurian beaurocracies have realised that their power is under threat from free access to What Other People Think. (We'll just put pr0n and such to one side here as basically a side effect, even if on of the reasons why the net has grown so huge, so quickly). What do you do if something is a threat? Control access to it! You don't want to dismantle it, especially when it can be so useful to you, but you certainly don't want those grubby plebians getting access!
Congratulations, my friends! we, all of us, have built something which Threatens World Safety (as defined by the people who brought you the Bay of Pigs and Enron). Now that we have built this pearl around the nucleus which they provided (ARPANET), and made it into something in its own right, they want to take it back.
My father just recently was awarded his PhD thesis on the organisation of an academic department and the effects of management on staff morale and the ability of the depatment to perform its function (teaching engineering to students). (Sorry, it's not on the web, but it was done through RMIT, melbourne, australia, which should help finding it.)
Every so often, while he was writing it, I would send a Dilbert cartoon. His reaction was usually something along the lines of 'but that's the conclusion of chapter 3!'. Spooky.
Seriously, his findings were that his management almost systematically ignored all sugestions of the staff, and implemented their own hare-brained idiot schemes, which didn't work. When they didn't succeed, who was blamed? The staff! Management played their political games and got their bonuses, staff got angry (and left in droves), the students got shafted and everything went to hell in a handbasket.
Of course, his thesis was of a particular situation, but human nature is the same everywhere. The conclusions are general: if your business is of an intellectual nature (such as education, or software development), then you have (hopefully) hired your staff for a reason: they are not stupid. If they come to you with an idea of how to do something better, or why something should not be done at all... listen to them! At least think about the concept before dismissing it - it may even have merit! And if you do reject it, then tell them why. No-one likes being treated like an idiot or a child. Especially those who have been especially hired because they can think for themselves.
Oh, and most politics is petty, stupid, and stops any actual work getting done. But then, we knew that!:)
There are probably major themes in dad's thesis I've left out or misrepresented slightly, but that was the gist of it.
Re:Ex-programmers make the best managers
on
Do You Like Your Job?
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· Score: 4, Funny
There are two problem with having a boss who does/ used to do what you are doing now:
1: They are under the impression that if they think something is easy, then it is easy. This is even worse when they are brilliant, and you are merely adequate, and
2: They know what you should be doing. It is a lot harder to fool your boss with 'Just stress-testing the network' (with Quake Deathmatch), when he used to do it too!
Hitler was elected too. First thing he did was stir up xenophobic terror and hatred and create such an atmosphere of fear that he was able to annul the constitution and become dictator with very little effective protest.
(Of course, it helped that those protestors were mostly either dead or exiled at that point).
No-one can be compared with Hitler until they have equalled his... 'achievements'. Let us hope and pray that that never happens. But, if we, the human race, do not look at what he did and how he did it and learn from that, then it will happen again.
George W. is nothing like Hitler. But he could be. Bin Laden is nothing like Hitler. But he could be. There are signs and portents in the world, and they don't look promising.
It comes down to every human being to look at the things happening around them and say to themselves "has this happened before?" and "what happened when it did?".
I have looked at What Really Happened before and found it interesting, if paranoid to a fault. You referred to an essay which I would love to read, but I can't.
Apparantly, some time between this morning Aus time (the last time I looked at it) and now, The site has gone down. Hard. Try it for yourself: I got a 'does not have a DNS entry' error.
I predict that in the future, stuff will happen, and some of it will be wierd.
I mean, really, some of this stuff is obvious, some of it has happened, and most of it is in the 10 years + range, and you can predict anything you want.
Come on, The Matrix will be real? What version: Gibson's or the movie?
Anyone who actually makes meaningful decisions predicated on these 'predicitions' being accurate deserves what they get.
Before any of this can be taken seriously, I want to see the data which was used to extrapolate technology trends. Without that, it is just a bunch of PHBs sitting around a 'brainstorming' whiteboard, masturbating.
Smart Barbie insists on allowance for clothes and accessories 2003
Shopping Barbie acts as personal shopper for children 2004
Living genetically engineered Furby (TM, Tiger Electronics) 2040
He's joking, isn't he? Please? Tell me he's joking!?
1. Raymond had his sites shut down and erased without consultation after a threatening letter from the authorities. He restored it from backups and now serves it from a US-based site, which has itself had nastygrams from the Australian government demanding the site be closed down.
2. The government banned the books by threatening the bookstores if they carried them. The australian address in question is the PUBLISHER (who has also been sued for defamation and such for publishing these books). They were very briefly available in bookstores (which is when I found Vic. Policce Corruption Vols 1&2), and then disappeared without trace.
3. The site desperately needs to be edited for layout, clarity, badd speling, and grammer. I think its obvious that they mean 'pay us in Australian Dollars, or in US dollars to an equivalent amount as per the current exchange rate
The responses I have seen fall mainly into these groups:
If everyone could see the list, they would know where to go to get the good stuff. Duhh!
This list is pointless because filters won't work anyway. Duhh!
(Rarely) Umm, this has potential repurcussions which go beyond kiddy-pr0n...
But it doesn't matter, because they haven't gone after any political sites anyway! and
Stephen King dead at 58
I think we can ignore number 5. As for the others;
2. There is no filter. As several people have pointed out, this legislation is to provide for the prosecution of ISPs for hosting a site which is mentioned on the blacklist. There is no consultation. And, as the list is itself censored, there is no appeal.
1. It also means that the public who is funding these actions, and are directly affected by them are forbidden from finding out a] what is being done in their name, and b] how effective it has been in eliminating the societal bane of being able to look at nekkid ladies.
3. Kudos to these people. Sometimes, you can be paranoid and they're out to get you.
4. Yes they have. Raymond Hoser's site may not be the prettiest, but deserves to be looked at for what he is trying to say. (just try to ignore the ugly banners and flashing GIFs.)
Refer also to my reply to point 2. When we don't know what has been gone after, how the hell can we turn around and say "but they haven't gone after any political sites!" What is the evidence for this? More to the point where is the evidence? In that file, and the most likely explanations for its censorship are either a] reflexive beaurocratic obstructionist B.S. or b] the protection and hiding of potentially sensitive or incriminating evidence.
As I said before, Sometimes you are paranoid, sometimes they really are out to get you. How are we supposed to tell which is true when the official government line is "keep doing what you have been doing. If it is illegal, we (might) tell you."
ISPs are required to provide filtering software (fairly benign, no?) and
if the responsible goverment body recieves a complaint (say from a federal minister?) about a website, and that site is hosted in Australia, then the ISP is contacted and asked nicely (*cough*told*cough*) to remove the offending site. Most do with no questions asked and no notice given. Some others do inform the site owner and tell them why the page is being taken off. As I understand it, though, if the ISP does not remove the site it is liable to Criminal Charges.
For an example where this power has already been used, have a look at Raymond Hoser's website. Strident, I know, and he could use some pointers on HTML and page design, but the story is the same. He published a book on Wildlife smuggling, and the collusion and corruption he found in the NSW wildlife service, and was hounded out of NSW. He later, as a result of his experiences as a Taxi driver in Melbourne, wrote 'Victorian Police Corruption' Vols 1 and 2. As a result of these books... well.
I can't help thinking how the blacklisting of the list (and any information on punitive actions taken, from warnings to charges), serves mainly to hide the exact proportion of kiddy-pr0n vs real political dissent.
Hey, maybe I'm just paranoid, and The Government really is just here to help us (by telling us what it is too dangerous to be allowed to read). But I doubt
ElComSoft's chief executive, Alex Katalov, said he was pleased that the company, not Sklyarov, would bear sole responsibility for the charges.
"Unquote from the report.
Re:Why not new Nobel Prizes? Math Prize and more..
on
Nobel Prizes Awarded
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· Score: 1
My professor at university claimed that there isn't a Nobel prize for Mathematics because Alfred Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician... but I suspect that's just a rumour put about to make maths look interesting:-)
Or, in english: A terrorist is anyone who has killed someone in a terrorist act, OR is thought -- on whatever evidence (or lack thereof) -- to be one, OR knows someone else who has been defined to be a terrorist OR is suspected on whatever evidence to know someone else who is defined as a terrorist. That other person has been defined under the same rules. A cursory look shows that this is recursive, and can start a cascade of 'terrorists' on the basis of one anonymous phone call about someone who may or may not have anything to do with real terrorism to begin with.
This same algorithm can be used in the McCarthyist Communist Scares, or the Salem Witch trials, or in any other moral panic where innocent people have been convicted and destroyed (ruined or killed) by accusations of wrong-doing which were later prooved vexatious or false.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean ... It's not just me?
There are others?
Do you think we need a support group?
Just a thought, but it may be relevant that to 95.4% of the world's population, that foreign government is yours. And the US government has itself said -- and proved in action -- that if UN resolutions are inconvenient, then they will be ignored in favour of whatever action the US government deems appropriate or expedient.
Saying 'but we're the good guys!' over and over will not make it so. Consider all the wars of invasion and intimidation over the last 50 years (Panama, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Libya, etc), all on demonised 'not-quite humans'. Consider the overt and unashamed US support of such 'democrats' as Suharto in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philipines, Just about everyone in Central America and (formerly) Qaddafi, Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden.
This is not to say that the US is satan incarnate, and everyone else are angels. People can, and do, do things every day to each other that are horrible and sickening. My own country, Australia, was complicit in the invasion, occupation and attempted genocide in East Timor.
But most other players in the game do not have military budgets measured in multiple billions.
It's not just that the US government does these things (though that is bad enough), it is that these things are done with impunity.
I'll shut up now.
At what point does 'simple' become stupid?
... buffer overflow attack!
Trivial but emblematic example: assuming that the string you are being sent will stay below a certain size means you don't need boundary checking. Congratulations! You have just made the main loop faster by orders of magnitude and much more human-readable!
Oops
But, but, but the code was simple! Its not my fault!
Bad analogy
Can we say that Kiddy pr0nographers are the new Nazis
Try more the analogy of a website that displays softporn, you know -- nipples and maybe a peek of pubic hair. This is legal in most western countries (as far as I know). Someone downloads this to Japan, where (again, afaik) images of pubic hair are illegal. (This is the nation that produced the popular (in Japan) manga 'RapeMan', but that is another story.) Can this purveyor of filth be extradited from the US, GB or Australia to Japan because they broke a law which they had no way of knowing even existed?
More than that -- should they?
The Dickensian years of the Industrial Revolution weren't all bad ... after all, was it not the massive poverty and high artificial crime (stealing bread in order to feed a family of 12, etc.) rate that 'encouraged' people to move to the colonies? Was it not England's masterful management of a small disease isolated to one species of potato that 'encouraged' the Irish diaspora?
... loved coming back, what a great opportunity for another Diaspora!
Hey, without the Industrial Revolution, and its consequent industrial-scale human suffering, Australia might not exist! And neither would the (fast fading) memory of world-famous Australian socialist policies like free universal education, yea, even unto University, and free universal medical coverage.
But hey, with policies and practices that Dickens knew and
Mars, anyone?
... which is a lot, when you consider that pr0nography takes up at least 48% of bandwidth now, followed by 27.5% going to unnecessary and vapid streaming video net-conferences and most of the rest of the bandwidth going to Windows XP telling MS about the contents of people's hard drives.
Somebody's numbers must be out!
Umm, is it just me, or is the Internet(TM) being taken away from us, piece by piece?
... thought coming into mind ...
More to the point, is it just me, or is the US govt, in conjunction with the Zaibatsus (hi, Bill!), expressing more and more interest in being able to say who can and cannot play in what had been made into a global sandpit?
Wait
#ifdef RANT
The way any power structure exercises power is to control who can and cannot do x. When the powers are comfortable in their authority and control, then restrictions are unnecessary, and therefore few. The more the powers get frightened that their control may be slipping, the more controls are instituted. The ultimate sanction is execution ('Thou shalt not kill' circumvented by defining lawful killing != murder. Think about this: execution == lawful murder). On the net, extreme sanction is denying the priviledge of being allowed to interface with dangerous thoughts. This means censorship, nannyware, great firewalls, Passport(TM) and now this.
The internet was built by people, not governments, although governments are responsible for allowing access to the internet (mainly through infrastructure -- phone lines and international pipes), although privatisation increasingly means that even this has been taken out of their hands (with a sigh of relief on their part, usually).
But now, even the saurian beaurocracies have realised that their power is under threat from free access to What Other People Think. (We'll just put pr0n and such to one side here as basically a side effect, even if on of the reasons why the net has grown so huge, so quickly). What do you do if something is a threat? Control access to it! You don't want to dismantle it, especially when it can be so useful to you, but you certainly don't want those grubby plebians getting access!
Congratulations, my friends! we, all of us, have built something which Threatens World Safety (as defined by the people who brought you the Bay of Pigs and Enron). Now that we have built this pearl around the nucleus which they provided (ARPANET), and made it into something in its own right, they want to take it back.
Well? what are you going to do about it?
#endif
Thank you for your time.
My father just recently was awarded his PhD thesis on the organisation of an academic department and the effects of management on staff morale and the ability of the depatment to perform its function (teaching engineering to students). (Sorry, it's not on the web, but it was done through RMIT, melbourne, australia, which should help finding it.)
... listen to them! At least think about the concept before dismissing it - it may even have merit!
:)
Every so often, while he was writing it, I would send a Dilbert cartoon. His reaction was usually something along the lines of 'but that's the conclusion of chapter 3!'. Spooky.
Seriously, his findings were that his management almost systematically ignored all sugestions of the staff, and implemented their own hare-brained idiot schemes, which didn't work. When they didn't succeed, who was blamed? The staff! Management played their political games and got their bonuses, staff got angry (and left in droves), the students got shafted and everything went to hell in a handbasket.
Of course, his thesis was of a particular situation, but human nature is the same everywhere. The conclusions are general: if your business is of an intellectual nature (such as education, or software development), then you have (hopefully) hired your staff for a reason: they are not stupid. If they come to you with an idea of how to do something better, or why something should not be done at all
And if you do reject it, then tell them why. No-one likes being treated like an idiot or a child. Especially those who have been especially hired because they can think for themselves.
Oh, and most politics is petty, stupid, and stops any actual work getting done. But then, we knew that!
There are probably major themes in dad's thesis I've left out or misrepresented slightly, but that was the gist of it.
There are two problem with having a boss who does/ used to do what you are doing now:
1: They are under the impression that if they think something is easy, then it is easy. This is even worse when they are brilliant, and you are merely adequate, and
2: They know what you should be doing. It is a lot harder to fool your boss with 'Just stress-testing the network' (with Quake Deathmatch), when he used to do it too!
But then, sometimes he joins in!
Hitler was elected too. First thing he did was stir up xenophobic terror and hatred and create such an atmosphere of fear that he was able to annul the constitution and become dictator with very little effective protest.
... 'achievements'. Let us hope and pray that that never happens. But, if we, the human race, do not look at what he did and how he did it and learn from that, then it will happen again.
(Of course, it helped that those protestors were mostly either dead or exiled at that point).
No-one can be compared with Hitler until they have equalled his
George W. is nothing like Hitler. But he could be. Bin Laden is nothing like Hitler. But he could be. There are signs and portents in the world, and they don't look promising.
It comes down to every human being to look at the things happening around them and say to themselves "has this happened before?" and "what happened when it did?".
I would love to follow that link, I really would.
I have looked at What Really Happened before and found it interesting, if paranoid to a fault. You referred to an essay which I would love to read, but I can't.
Apparantly, some time between this morning Aus time (the last time I looked at it) and now, The site has gone down. Hard. Try it for yourself: I got a 'does not have a DNS entry' error.
That can't be good.
Hey, maybe I can be a futurist too?
I mean, really, some of this stuff is obvious, some of it has happened, and most of it is in the 10 years + range, and you can predict anything you want.
Come on, The Matrix will be real? What version: Gibson's or the movie?
Anyone who actually makes meaningful decisions predicated on these 'predicitions' being accurate deserves what they get.
Before any of this can be taken seriously, I want to see the data which was used to extrapolate technology trends. Without that, it is just a bunch of PHBs sitting around a 'brainstorming' whiteboard, masturbating.
Stupidity.
He's joking, isn't he? Please? Tell me he's joking!?
... but is a serious question.
What effect does this decision have on everyone in the world who isn't in the USA?
Would enforcement rely on a Skylarov effect, or an 'effective place of publication' ruling, or both?
1. Raymond had his sites shut down and erased without consultation after a threatening letter from the authorities. He restored it from backups and now serves it from a US-based site, which has itself had nastygrams from the Australian government demanding the site be closed down.
2. The government banned the books by threatening the bookstores if they carried them. The australian address in question is the PUBLISHER (who has also been sued for defamation and such for publishing these books). They were very briefly available in bookstores (which is when I found Vic. Policce Corruption Vols 1&2), and then disappeared without trace.
3. The site desperately needs to be edited for layout, clarity, badd speling, and grammer. I think its obvious that they mean 'pay us in Australian Dollars, or in US dollars to an equivalent amount as per the current exchange rate
The responses I have seen fall mainly into these groups:
I think we can ignore number 5. As for the others;
2. There is no filter. As several people have pointed out, this legislation is to provide for the prosecution of ISPs for hosting a site which is mentioned on the blacklist. There is no consultation. And, as the list is itself censored, there is no appeal.
1. It also means that the public who is funding these actions, and are directly affected by them are forbidden from finding out a] what is being done in their name, and b] how effective it has been in eliminating the societal bane of being able to look at nekkid ladies.
3. Kudos to these people. Sometimes, you can be paranoid and they're out to get you.
4. Yes they have. Raymond Hoser's site may not be the prettiest, but deserves to be looked at for what he is trying to say. (just try to ignore the ugly banners and flashing GIFs.)
Refer also to my reply to point 2. When we don't know what has been gone after, how the hell can we turn around and say "but they haven't gone after any political sites!" What is the evidence for this? More to the point where is the evidence? In that file, and the most likely explanations for its censorship are either a] reflexive beaurocratic obstructionist B.S. or b] the protection and hiding of potentially sensitive or incriminating evidence.
As I said before, Sometimes you are paranoid, sometimes they really are out to get you. How are we supposed to tell which is true when the official government line is "keep doing what you have been doing. If it is illegal, we (might) tell you."
Oh yes there is: Raymond Hoser's 'Smuggled' site is woefully designed, but is a counterexample to your thesis.
For an example where this power has already been used, have a look at Raymond Hoser's website. Strident, I know, and he could use some pointers on HTML and page design, but the story is the same. He published a book on Wildlife smuggling, and the collusion and corruption he found in the NSW wildlife service, and was hounded out of NSW. He later, as a result of his experiences as a Taxi driver in Melbourne, wrote 'Victorian Police Corruption' Vols 1 and 2. As a result of these books
I can't help thinking how the blacklisting of the list (and any information on punitive actions taken, from warnings to charges), serves mainly to hide the exact proportion of kiddy-pr0n vs real political dissent.
Hey, maybe I'm just paranoid, and The Government really is just here to help us (by telling us what it is too dangerous to be allowed to read). But I doubt
Yes, but only 57.7 years into the past in this case. Still...
That Brown Dwarf is now getting our radio and TV broadcasts from early 1945.
Sit back and think for a second about what it is still to receive. Mmmm, I Love Lucy...
Mmmmm... A.I.
Quote"
"Unquote from the report.
*cough*Urban Myth*cough*.
Its a nice story, but Nobel died a batchelor.
Surely, the message in all these posts is that PayPal is neither Trustworthy nor Convenient!
The balance you speak of may still be there, but the scales have been dropped down a mineshaft!
THESE LAWS ARE UNECESSARY FOR COMBATING TERRORISM! CURRENT LAWS ARE SUFFICIENT! WHY IS THE FBI, CIA, AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT DOING THIS?
You said it yourself in points a), b) and c).
This pseudo-state-code (?) may explain:
CONTACT(x,y) = person x has had contact at some point with person y
TERRORISM(x) = person x has committed a terrorist act (in the narrow sense of killing innocent people)
SUSPECTED(x) = the state x is not known but is inferred on the basis of information ranging from irrefuteable proof to an anonymous tip-off
IS_TERRORIST(x) = TERRORISM(x) | SUSPECTED(TERRORISM(x)) | CONTACT(x,IS_TERRORIST(y)) | SUSPECTED(CONTACT(x,IS_TERRORIST(y)))
Or, in english: A terrorist is anyone who has killed someone in a terrorist act, OR is thought -- on whatever evidence (or lack thereof) -- to be one, OR knows someone else who has been defined to be a terrorist OR is suspected on whatever evidence to know someone else who is defined as a terrorist. That other person has been defined under the same rules. A cursory look shows that this is recursive, and can start a cascade of 'terrorists' on the basis of one anonymous phone call about someone who may or may not have anything to do with real terrorism to begin with.
This same algorithm can be used in the McCarthyist Communist Scares, or the Salem Witch trials, or in any other moral panic where innocent people have been convicted and destroyed (ruined or killed) by accusations of wrong-doing which were later prooved vexatious or false.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
As opposed to SMS messages on their mobile phones?