since when did the mission of DHS become copyright enforcement?
Customs enforcement. The term you're looking for is customs enforcement. That's what the "CE" in "ICE" (a part of DHS) stands for. Regardless of the overall organizational changes at the top, there's nothing new about enforcing customs, and most of what was involved in this particular wave related to counterfeit goods. Nothing new, here. You traffic in faked merchandise, you get your boat seized, or your warehouse raided, or other aspects of your operation (say, your web site) shut down by a judge as the case is prosecuted. Not enough evidence to show you're actually doing that stuff? The judge won't issue the order... or, you can get another judge to step in, when you show that your warehouse full of falsely-marked sports brand paraphenalia is actually legit. Of course the operations listed, in this case, are all flagrant knock-off guys, selling bogus wares. That they now have web sites, instead of just selling out of the back of a van, doesn't really change the legality of shutting them down.
ICE is part of DHS. The "C" in ICE stands for "Customs." The sites involved were taken down under a court order. Read the actual paperwork involved... much of this action was about web sites dealing with counterfeit goods, faked product labels, etc. Stuff that has been the responsibility of customs agents for as long as we've enforced customs laws (i.e., back when we were just colonies, and ever since). Taking down a web site that's part of a counterfeit goods operation isn't any different than padlocking, on the same judges's orders, a warehouse that's involved in such an operation, or seizing a boat full of counterfeit goods as it enters port. It's a matter of stopping a crime in progress. First amendment portections for free speech don't provide cover for fraud and other criminal activity.
You obviously don't know anything about how narcotics/explosives dogs work. And that's really the problem, here - people with no clue about logistics proposing non-solutions to the wrong problems.
In that they are not 100% reliable, yes. A huge army of dogs, handlers, and their support system would be more so. Not to mention the people who inevitably freak out about the dogs, and sue over having been "menaced" by them, just like they're calling pat-downs "sexual assault."
That many dogs and handlers, on duty for millions of passengers, is not only also not fool-proof, but is fantastically expensive. If you know people in that line of work, you'll understand.
The Israeli method relies on very talented people taking a very close look at the brains of the passengers. It's pyschologically intrusive, as opposed to see-how-fat-you-are intrusive. Regardless, I don't think the TSA could hire enough people with those skills to handle the much larger (than Israel) air traffic that wanders through the US. Even more importantly, the US public (well, the more vocal part of the lefty punditocracy, anyway) won't tolerate even the notion that, gosh, further scutiny of someone might be called for because of things like where they're traveling from, how they're dressed, what they appear to do (or not) for a living, how they appear to handle - culturally - where they are and what's going on around them... you know: profiling. The Israeli system works as well as it does because they're ready, willing, and able to say that word out loud without collapsing in a quivering heap of politcally correct jello. The current administration prefers to have Grandma groped and full-body-scanned because the alternative is to talk - out loud - about how judgement about people would be required. And we can't have that, because it's wrong to form opinions about people from the clues they present in their bearing, manner, clothing, habits, transactional history, blah blah blah.
is that those who get cancer from radiation exposure if these body scanners are more widely used, will be a number orders of magnitude greater than those killed by terrorists, if we had no security at all
Proverbial citation needed.
Really, huh? No security at all? You do understand that the TSA collects large knives and firearms, frequently loaded, from people boarding planes each and every day, right?
Man, you are so right. I mean, just looking at your own post, it's obvious that you've got some sort of malware proxy sneaking around on your machine, trying to make you look bad by changing the word "boxes" to "boxen" as your browser posts via http. You should get that looked at.
pro-establishment media... failed to resist loose women... whoring themselves... pro-violence media manipulators... arms industry... Sweeden [sic]... The only crime Assuange has made against me was to not tell these whores to fuck off when they draped themselves over him.
I personally have no opinion as to whether these charges are true or not - there just isn't enough data to support any conclusion.
You are obviously a shill for Big Rationality. Go astroturf somewhere else! We here at slashdot know what we know, and that's that, mister.
Regards,
Hans Reiser, Director of Media Relations
Though it has blown the crap out of multiple passenger trains. So, what you're saying is that people willing to die in order to kill other people will never get around to rigging up a better detonation device, especially if we stop screening for the stuff?
There was enough of it in the underwear bomb to take out the side of the aircraft (and bring it down). He didn't have a well-built detonation device. But from your perspective, that means we can just back off on looking it, since it's so last month to fret about that kind of explosive? If you haven't noticed, people like AQ and those they train repeatedly try and polish the same techniques, and then stick with what works. They've killed a lot of people doing so, and they sure don't care if a few of their own idiotic foot soldiers die or are injured in the attempts to get it down to Terrorist Best Practices.
So what do you suggest we do? Live in fear for the rest of our lives?
Do you consider having armed guards and bullet-proof glass at your bank, or traffic control signals, or vaccinations, or a criminal justice system, or locks on your house to be signs that you're walking around in abject fear... or just practices that are in keeping with the reality of what people actually do and experience?
Ok, skip the explosives screening. Do you think that metal detectors to spot guns, knives, and grenades are worth using, as people board a plane? If so, why... because you're quivering in fear, or because it's just rational to do so? If not, are you really thinking that such attacks would be infrequent, or do you think that we'd be back to a "skyjacking" every other week, like we were when crazies realized how cool it was back in the 1970's? Except, now it's fashionable among the religious crazies to die while hurting other people. Do you imagine that less screening will make it less fashionable? Why?
True. That is, if by "untested" you mean "tested by numerous entities within the private, educational, and government sectors and found to present less radiation (that matters) than approximately two minutes worth of the exposure everyone gets while flying at 30,000 feet in the very airplanes they're about to get on. So, considering that people are specifically and willingly buying a ticket to do something that will and always has actually exposed them to wildly more radiation in the first place, that's not much of an issue, is it?
Perhaps if you stopped bombing them, they would stop bombing you
No. The crazy jihaddist types are quite clear that it's the very existence of non-Islamist societies, anywhere, that they consider intolerable. The aren't exporting Taliban-style cruelty and medieval theo-thuggery into places like Somalia because they're mad about a representative democracy in Iraq or because it's easier to wack people who murder school teachers and police cadets with a drone than it is to send in a column of troops for a firefight.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Which is why you've chosen to live in a town that has no police department, why you don't wear your seatbelt, don't lock your door when you leave the house, and will now post your banking information in a reply to this commment, right? After all, you aren't truly free otherwise. You don't deserve liberty unless you refuse to practice self defense, right?
You don't think the risk changes when you announce that even though we now have many recorded attempts to use things like PETN to kill people on aircraft (and to bring aircraft down into large cities) that we're going to stop checking for it? Why would groups (like AQ) who show a great willingness to use any technique that has worked in the past, change their approach now? Right. They wouldn't, and they haven't.
What would happen if we stopped making up crazy situations in our heads to justify the total loss of our freedoms?
Yeah, if we could just stop imagining insane scenarios like groups that recieve formal training on how to use mentally retarded young women to carry bombs into vegetable markets, or jihaddist crazies with PETN in their underwear or their shoes, looking to kill a few hundred people. Or insane, crazy situations like young suburbanites magically thinking that they're going to glory when they carry explosives onto trains in London or Madrid... I mean, none of that could ever REALLY happen, so it's just craziness to think of such stuff from a security perspective.
Governments are not like private enterprise, in an age of fiat currency, we can't exactly 'bankrupt' the TSA like consumers can run a business into the ground by not choosing to use them.
Sure you can. You vote for someone running on a platform that pitches less hassle at the airport in exchange for the higher risk of being killed on your approach to Detroit. If enough people think the risk of that happening won't go up when people aren't screened for PETN-lined underwear, then the case will be made, and the legislature can tear down the TSA or any given program they like. Simple as that. So, all you have to do is persuasively make the case that the mulitple recent just-getting-warmed-up incidents of people being willing to kill themselves to bring down an aircraft will stop as soon as we stop checking for the explosives they like to use.
It's going to keep the West in knots for a few years, hardening against "the last threat," while they've got the next threat now, and are working on the one beyond that.
You know, people always say that, but what happens if you don't harden against the last threat? It gets used on you again, that's what. Just because if was the last threat doesn't mean that a bad guy isn't going to contemplate using it, should he see the vulnerability. Just because ID thefts over the internet are a fashionable new crime doesn't mean that locking your door when you leave your house is now pointless.
He "hacked" a single email account a handful of hours of community service and nothing on his record. There is nothing to show a pattern or even any real malice intent he guessed a trivial password for haha's
You're being every bit as disengenuous as he was. He was hacking into her account to look for dirt in an attempt to manipulate the outcome of a national election. Still, just a misdemeanor. But then he went on to deliberately obstruct the investigation, lying to investigators, attempting to hide evidence, etc. Most of his sentence (which doesn't involve prison time, but of course you know that, and you're just trolling) is a result of his dicking around with the law enforcement agencies, not with the hack itself.
The is a solution searching for a problem so that this defense contractor can get paid with US Taxpayer money
Yup just like those scam artists who came up with so-called "helicopters" and "two way radios" and "satellite communications" and "automatic weapons" (those damn machine guns are so much more complicated than a musket... typical defense contractor and arms dealer nonsense).
Slashdot Mirror
since when did the mission of DHS become copyright enforcement?
... or, you can get another judge to step in, when you show that your warehouse full of falsely-marked sports brand paraphenalia is actually legit. Of course the operations listed, in this case, are all flagrant knock-off guys, selling bogus wares. That they now have web sites, instead of just selling out of the back of a van, doesn't really change the legality of shutting them down.
Customs enforcement. The term you're looking for is customs enforcement. That's what the "CE" in "ICE" (a part of DHS) stands for. Regardless of the overall organizational changes at the top, there's nothing new about enforcing customs, and most of what was involved in this particular wave related to counterfeit goods. Nothing new, here. You traffic in faked merchandise, you get your boat seized, or your warehouse raided, or other aspects of your operation (say, your web site) shut down by a judge as the case is prosecuted. Not enough evidence to show you're actually doing that stuff? The judge won't issue the order
ICE is part of DHS. The "C" in ICE stands for "Customs." The sites involved were taken down under a court order. Read the actual paperwork involved ... much of this action was about web sites dealing with counterfeit goods, faked product labels, etc. Stuff that has been the responsibility of customs agents for as long as we've enforced customs laws (i.e., back when we were just colonies, and ever since). Taking down a web site that's part of a counterfeit goods operation isn't any different than padlocking, on the same judges's orders, a warehouse that's involved in such an operation, or seizing a boat full of counterfeit goods as it enters port. It's a matter of stopping a crime in progress. First amendment portections for free speech don't provide cover for fraud and other criminal activity.
You obviously don't know anything about how narcotics/explosives dogs work. And that's really the problem, here - people with no clue about logistics proposing non-solutions to the wrong problems.
In that they are not 100% reliable, yes. A huge army of dogs, handlers, and their support system would be more so. Not to mention the people who inevitably freak out about the dogs, and sue over having been "menaced" by them, just like they're calling pat-downs "sexual assault."
That many dogs and handlers, on duty for millions of passengers, is not only also not fool-proof, but is fantastically expensive. If you know people in that line of work, you'll understand.
The Israeli method relies on very talented people taking a very close look at the brains of the passengers. It's pyschologically intrusive, as opposed to see-how-fat-you-are intrusive. Regardless, I don't think the TSA could hire enough people with those skills to handle the much larger (than Israel) air traffic that wanders through the US. Even more importantly, the US public (well, the more vocal part of the lefty punditocracy, anyway) won't tolerate even the notion that, gosh, further scutiny of someone might be called for because of things like where they're traveling from, how they're dressed, what they appear to do (or not) for a living, how they appear to handle - culturally - where they are and what's going on around them ... you know: profiling. The Israeli system works as well as it does because they're ready, willing, and able to say that word out loud without collapsing in a quivering heap of politcally correct jello. The current administration prefers to have Grandma groped and full-body-scanned because the alternative is to talk - out loud - about how judgement about people would be required. And we can't have that, because it's wrong to form opinions about people from the clues they present in their bearing, manner, clothing, habits, transactional history, blah blah blah.
is that those who get cancer from radiation exposure if these body scanners are more widely used, will be a number orders of magnitude greater than those killed by terrorists, if we had no security at all
Proverbial citation needed.
Really, huh? No security at all? You do understand that the TSA collects large knives and firearms, frequently loaded, from people boarding planes each and every day, right?
I'm afraid you're screwed whatever you do.
Man, you are so right. I mean, just looking at your own post, it's obvious that you've got some sort of malware proxy sneaking around on your machine, trying to make you look bad by changing the word "boxes" to "boxen" as your browser posts via http. You should get that looked at.
The TSA confiscates knives and guns from passengers at airport security screenings every day.
pro-establishment media ... failed to resist loose women ... whoring themselves ... pro-violence media manipulators ... arms industry ... Sweeden [sic] ... The only crime Assuange has made against me was to not tell these whores to fuck off when they draped themselves over him.
Meds, man. Check your meds.
I personally have no opinion as to whether these charges are true or not - there just isn't enough data to support any conclusion.
You are obviously a shill for Big Rationality. Go astroturf somewhere else! We here at slashdot know what we know, and that's that, mister.
Regards,
Hans Reiser, Director of Media Relations
PETN has not brought down any airplane
Though it has blown the crap out of multiple passenger trains. So, what you're saying is that people willing to die in order to kill other people will never get around to rigging up a better detonation device, especially if we stop screening for the stuff?
There was enough of it in the underwear bomb to take out the side of the aircraft (and bring it down). He didn't have a well-built detonation device. But from your perspective, that means we can just back off on looking it, since it's so last month to fret about that kind of explosive? If you haven't noticed, people like AQ and those they train repeatedly try and polish the same techniques, and then stick with what works. They've killed a lot of people doing so, and they sure don't care if a few of their own idiotic foot soldiers die or are injured in the attempts to get it down to Terrorist Best Practices.
So what do you suggest we do? Live in fear for the rest of our lives?
... or just practices that are in keeping with the reality of what people actually do and experience?
... because you're quivering in fear, or because it's just rational to do so? If not, are you really thinking that such attacks would be infrequent, or do you think that we'd be back to a "skyjacking" every other week, like we were when crazies realized how cool it was back in the 1970's? Except, now it's fashionable among the religious crazies to die while hurting other people. Do you imagine that less screening will make it less fashionable? Why?
Do you consider having armed guards and bullet-proof glass at your bank, or traffic control signals, or vaccinations, or a criminal justice system, or locks on your house to be signs that you're walking around in abject fear
Ok, skip the explosives screening. Do you think that metal detectors to spot guns, knives, and grenades are worth using, as people board a plane? If so, why
a device with untested health effects
True. That is, if by "untested" you mean "tested by numerous entities within the private, educational, and government sectors and found to present less radiation (that matters) than approximately two minutes worth of the exposure everyone gets while flying at 30,000 feet in the very airplanes they're about to get on. So, considering that people are specifically and willingly buying a ticket to do something that will and always has actually exposed them to wildly more radiation in the first place, that's not much of an issue, is it?
Perhaps if you stopped bombing them, they would stop bombing you
No. The crazy jihaddist types are quite clear that it's the very existence of non-Islamist societies, anywhere, that they consider intolerable. The aren't exporting Taliban-style cruelty and medieval theo-thuggery into places like Somalia because they're mad about a representative democracy in Iraq or because it's easier to wack people who murder school teachers and police cadets with a drone than it is to send in a column of troops for a firefight.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Which is why you've chosen to live in a town that has no police department, why you don't wear your seatbelt, don't lock your door when you leave the house, and will now post your banking information in a reply to this commment, right? After all, you aren't truly free otherwise. You don't deserve liberty unless you refuse to practice self defense, right?
that infinitesimal risk
You don't think the risk changes when you announce that even though we now have many recorded attempts to use things like PETN to kill people on aircraft (and to bring aircraft down into large cities) that we're going to stop checking for it? Why would groups (like AQ) who show a great willingness to use any technique that has worked in the past, change their approach now? Right. They wouldn't, and they haven't.
What would happen if we stopped making up crazy situations in our heads to justify the total loss of our freedoms?
... I mean, none of that could ever REALLY happen, so it's just craziness to think of such stuff from a security perspective.
Yeah, if we could just stop imagining insane scenarios like groups that recieve formal training on how to use mentally retarded young women to carry bombs into vegetable markets, or jihaddist crazies with PETN in their underwear or their shoes, looking to kill a few hundred people. Or insane, crazy situations like young suburbanites magically thinking that they're going to glory when they carry explosives onto trains in London or Madrid
Governments are not like private enterprise, in an age of fiat currency, we can't exactly 'bankrupt' the TSA like consumers can run a business into the ground by not choosing to use them.
Sure you can. You vote for someone running on a platform that pitches less hassle at the airport in exchange for the higher risk of being killed on your approach to Detroit. If enough people think the risk of that happening won't go up when people aren't screened for PETN-lined underwear, then the case will be made, and the legislature can tear down the TSA or any given program they like. Simple as that. So, all you have to do is persuasively make the case that the mulitple recent just-getting-warmed-up incidents of people being willing to kill themselves to bring down an aircraft will stop as soon as we stop checking for the explosives they like to use.
There is something wrong with the gropings they are mandating.
These are only mandated if the facility in question doesn't yet have the right imaging hardware.
But of course some cult rumored to be doing something bizarre isn't as sensational as generalizing it to all evangelical Christians in Brazil.
I think you're missing the point. Evangelical Christians are, by definition, always a cult doing something bizarre.
It's going to keep the West in knots for a few years, hardening against "the last threat," while they've got the next threat now, and are working on the one beyond that.
You know, people always say that, but what happens if you don't harden against the last threat? It gets used on you again, that's what. Just because if was the last threat doesn't mean that a bad guy isn't going to contemplate using it, should he see the vulnerability. Just because ID thefts over the internet are a fashionable new crime doesn't mean that locking your door when you leave your house is now pointless.
cutting you average fuel use almost to zero
Why do people keep saying things like this? "Burning some sort of fuel somewhere else, in advance" isn't the same as "burning zero fuel."
He "hacked" a single email account a handful of hours of community service and nothing on his record. There is nothing to show a pattern or even any real malice intent he guessed a trivial password for haha's
You're being every bit as disengenuous as he was. He was hacking into her account to look for dirt in an attempt to manipulate the outcome of a national election. Still, just a misdemeanor. But then he went on to deliberately obstruct the investigation, lying to investigators, attempting to hide evidence, etc. Most of his sentence (which doesn't involve prison time, but of course you know that, and you're just trolling) is a result of his dicking around with the law enforcement agencies, not with the hack itself.
The is a solution searching for a problem so that this defense contractor can get paid with US Taxpayer money
... typical defense contractor and arms dealer nonsense).
Yup just like those scam artists who came up with so-called "helicopters" and "two way radios" and "satellite communications" and "automatic weapons" (those damn machine guns are so much more complicated than a musket