Terror Watch List Swells to More Than 755,000 512
rdavison writes "According to a USA Today story, the terror watch list has swollen to 755,000 with 200,000 people per year being added since 2004. Adding about 548 people daily every day of the year does not seem to lend itself to a manual process with careful deliberation given or double checking being done for each person added. It seems to suggests that data is being mined from somewhere to automatically add names to the list."
wasting time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:wasting time (Score:5, Funny)
(*everybody except politicians and rich people, since they're vital to national security and economic welfare).
Re:wasting time (Score:5, Interesting)
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Solomon
Re:wasting time (Score:5, Insightful)
So it got us thinking...Why can't we have some sort of "pre-authorization" that shows that we are law-abiding citizens who pose no threat?"
Wow...as a people we are REALLY starting to think wrongly. As a US citizen, you could be assumed to be a "good citizen" and pose no threat unless your actions indicate otherwise. This falls in line with innocent until proven guilty. You should have to prove NOTHING unless you are arrested for a crime. My bad..if you are arrested...it is upt to the govt. to prove you did something, the burden is upon them, not you.
Man, this is scary thinking you're showing here my friend.
What War on Terror? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fallacy of the War on Terror - http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1212-13.htm [commondreams.org]
Re:wasting time (Score:5, Insightful)
People weren't supposed to live there. Anything that convinces people to avoid DC is a good thing IMO. Especially if the people in question are members of a legislative body...
Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Interesting)
As the Glasgow "terrorists" so brilliantly displayed, anybody can be a terrorist. All it takes is a car, a bunch of primitive explosive, flammable material and the motivation to endanger human life.
In my view, after September 11th the United States should have responded by doing one thing: Passing regulations that ensure that the cockpits of passenger aircraft are unable to be accessed from the passenger carrying part of the plane.
That's a proportionate response to the threat.
In reality, the terrorist threat is a several orders of a magnitude less than being killed by heart-disease. It's my view that in any problem solving situation, you should seek to solve the worst problem first and the smallest problem last.
The problem from where I'm sitting is that billions are being spent on a tiny fraction of deaths that occur in our countries. Where are the billions of dollars of funding to research heart-disease treatment, improving car safety, cancer treatments or the plethora of other much more likely ways you'll meet your sticky end?
What makes this irrational reaction so much worse is that we're selling our rights down the river for a false sense of security. If somebody passes me in the street and decides they want to kill me, there is nothing the long-arm of the state can do to stop them. I will likely die and the fact the person who killed me will spend a considerable time in prison is of little solace.
There are enough nut cases in the world to ensure that the chances of being killed in such a fashion are always going to be none zero. We all choose to walk about the street with our heads held high because we're not going to let that threat intimidate us. So why are we being intimidated by nutters who want to kill not just one person but quite a few of us?
It reminds me of the story of an elderly women in Warrington interviewed just after the IRA bomb detonated there, killing a young boy. The reporter asked why she was still shopping despite a bomb going off and she defiantly replied: "The Germans didn't stop me shopping so the Irish certainly won't."
Defiance is not giving away your freedom. Defiance is refusing to give away your freedom even if you life is at risk. We only need to look at those brave monks in Burma a few weeks ago to see what real defiance looks like. We've lost our back-bone and passed all sorts of onerous laws because we're afraid. We're pathetic and afraid.
When are we going to stand up and say - "To hell with stupid incompetent security. I want my freedom and I want it now."
Simon
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But the Arabs do, and I'm offended by the insinuation that Arabs are more intimidating than Germans!
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Funny)
So... I should turn in Ronald McDonald to Homeland Security??
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He may be a little scary, but that frozen-faced Burger King in their TV ads just plain creeps me out. The only thing that makes me faster to reach for the remote is any mention whatsoever of Donald Trump.
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Thank god for the TWL ! (Score:3, Funny)
Then let's thank God and the powers that be for the terrorist watch list (TWL), because anybody can be on it !
Re:Thank god for the TWL ! (Score:5, Funny)
Still ... (Score:2)
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Your name and IP has been added to the list.
- NSA
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the primary criteria of terrorist success is to "succeed in spreading fear into the population". By that criteria the terrorists have clearly won against our governments on every single count.
There is still some hope that they have not won against the general population in at least some parts of the country. There are still some John Smeatons around to "kick em in the bawls".
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One of the primary criteria of terrorist success is to "succeed in spreading fear into the population". By that criteria the terrorists have clearly won against our governments on every single count.
By that criteria, it is the governments that are the terrorists.
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By that criteria, the government is the terrorists.
It most definitely isn't working against them. Rather the opposite.
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Funny)
That's why we should support Gulianni for President. 9/11. Now more than ever. Rudy, 9/11, is a good, 9/11, candidate to bring us all together, 9/11, and remind us that the, 9/11, president serves all the people. Not just, 9/11, some of them. By the way, Rudy was there on 9/11 and saw first hand what will surely happen again if you don't vote for him.
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Thats it. Any logical person should be aware that a "fear monger" is a terrorist who uses fear and threat of violence to shape public opinion.
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That's not a good strategy. You don't go for the biggest fruit first, you go for the low hanging fruit. (You can choose the worst problem among the easy ones if you like, but don't ignore the easy ones because they're not as bad as the hard ones.)
From the point of view of Homeland Security, they're much more likely to be successful at stopping terrorist attacks than they would
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Um, what?
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/10/18/airport.screeners [cnn.com]
It violates the Constitution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Terrorist watch lists punish people without trial. They are deeply unAmerican and are a direct violation of your right to due process. It is time to end this madness and call those who support it what they are, traitors.
These proscriptions deprive people of their liberty and property. Those on the lists are unable to use air transport, may be discriminated against when they seek employment and are harassed generally when they conduct business. In short, they are treated as a kind of felon. Needless to say, there's no jury involved before the conviction of "terrorist" is applied.
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll Play (Score:4, Informative)
See. here's the deal, sport; I am a long time registered libertarian, and have at times in the past been very active within the LP Party. I am one of the few who can honestly state that I voted for Paul to be President in 1988. I have also researched Paul, and have discovered that he is no longer a REAL Libertarian, nor would his policies lead "to reducing the government regulations and protecting personal liberties".
I feel that defining Paul as a "libertarian" almost reaches to the level of being personally defamatory. His campaign statements are oppositional to at least four of the Libertarian Party's Platform Planks:
I will expound upon this as I offer up evidence of Paul's less than unyielding defense of both liberty and The US Constitution by analysing a few of his proposed Bills and Resolutions in Congress this year.
Paul's whole anti-immigrant posturing is both anti-libertarian, and counter to the original Intents of This Nation's founding. If you are opposed to non-American born residents in the U.S., that is one thing, but DO NOT attempt to foist off this belief as "protecting personal liberties", as it hinders the personal liberty of many, who are just looking for a better life. It is facially opposed to The LPs Immigration plank too. This proposed Constitutional Amendment would go even farther, and would withhold citizenship from even humans born within The Nation's Border.
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First, it should be noted that Ron Paul does not himself claim to be a true Libertarian as he recognizes that many of his positions are contrary to the standard Libertarian platform.
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Informative)
It could be said that he would like to protect the individual liberties of the unborn, but that is beside the point. His position on abortion is that it should not be addressed at the federal level at all, but left to the states to decide.
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:4, Interesting)
He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket (trip).
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.
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After all, even were he President, no way in hell is he going to get all of his own agenda -- there will be many compromises and many battles he can't win. But if he wins a few important ones, I think we'll all be better off. And given what Congress is like, there is absolutely NO danger of going TOO far in Ron Paul's political direction, if for no
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As Australia, California and other fire-prone areas show, anybody with a box of matches can be a terrorist.
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Welcome to the list my friend.
"In my view, after September 11th the United States should have responded by doing one thing: Passing regulations that ensure that the cockpits of passenger aircraft are unable to be accessed from the passenger carrying part of the plane."
I agree entirely. This is the best thing I have read on slashdot in a long time. Sadly however, humans fight with emotion, not logic.
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
9-11 wasn't a wake-up call for the administration. It was an excuse.
It's all about control... (Score:3, Insightful)
I know. (Score:2, Insightful)
Two extreme ways:
Be like the Dalai Lama or Ghandi and offer no violence and still hold up our heads high and work on why we're causing those people so much suffering and as a result of our peaceful and loving actions, gain the moral high ground and allies Worldwide and of ALL faiths because of i
Re:I know. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how to beat the terrorists: refuse to be terrorized.
Amen, brother! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure. I don't disagree at all. The road block though, is the folks who can't stand that we're (The USA) is being attacked. And, I personally know a few folks like this, we have to deal with the folks who firmly believe that the terrorists are this group of folks who are guided by an ideology that
Re:I know. (Score:4, Interesting)
The numbers for Germany are:
700 deads/yr by fishbone choking.
3-4 deads/yr by terrorism.
Basicly eating non filleted fish is about 200 times as dangerous as terrorism.
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Personally, I can't help but view terrorist incidents as being like tantrums thrown by an attention-hungry toddler. It rarely achieves anythin
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true enough. If you consider terrorism and disease both as causes of suffering and premature death in the population, then our response in the US to 9/11 is disproportionate. With just heart disease and cancer, the US suffers a 9/11 every day of the year.
I think "symbiotic" better describes that relationship.
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There is suggestive evidence that indicates that complicit and accessory before the fact are also reasonable things to believe, but it's only suggestive, not convincing.
OTOH, if I were to compare the probability of a politician chosen at random vs. a citizen (or and arab, for that matter) chosen at random, I'd bet that the politician was the more guilty, and the more directly involved. The evidence doesn't come close to "beyond a reasonable dou
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
The question isn't whether terrorists are bad, or whether we should try to protect ourselves from terrorists, because obviously they are and we should. But are all of the current preventative measures really effective? Or necessary? One could argue that the fact that there has not been another attack using aircraft is an indication that they are. Or one could say that no stone should remain unturned in the quest to keep people safe.
But the situation is not black and white. Every security measure has a price which can be measured in money, time, effort, convenience, and freedom. The hard part is to find the right balance. Many of us feel that the current measures are more symbolic than effective. If everyone has to sacrifice, to feel some of the daily pain, then won't we all feel safer?
I don't think that putting my toothpaste in a clear plastic bag before I get on an airplane makes my trip any safer. I don't understand why requiring the government to go before a judge before they can listen to my telephone conversations makes me less safe. How does flying suspects to other countries where more effective means of interrogation are permitted (and also signaling to our enemies that those methods acceptable in our society) really helping on the long run?
Yes, terrorists are bad people. But that doesn't mean that we should take unreasonable stepes to combat them.
After all, the goal of terrorism is to make people so afraid that they change their behavior. That's why it is called terror ism. And when you look at all of the things that the government is doing to try to stop them, it certainly looks like the terrorists are meeting their objectives.
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Informative)
Underneath it simply said "More security does not mean you are more secure."
I think it sums up our situation pretty effectively.
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The same artist replaced some adverts in a local Hilton Hotel with ads that featured a half-topless, not-so-classy Paris Hilton and read, "Pampered and Privileged: For over 80 years the Hilton name has been synonymous with elegance and c
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
How you hinder/cripple the terrorist is by removing the sympathy he needs to operate in. SO in the North of Irerland, kicking down the doors of ordinary innocent people houses led to MORE support of the terrorist - " Hey Mick, could you mind this _bag of tools_ for a week for me - wink wink" - OK Paddy, no problem.
However, if Mick had not had his door kicked in he would probably tell Paddy to fuck off, he might not call the police, but he would no co-operate so easily.
and this is how terrorists grow successful, they need rich soil of disaffected people who have been touched in bad ways by the supposed good guys. DO we believe that there is any Iraqi who has ANY ties to Fallujah will say no when Ahmed asks to store a "bag of tools" for a week?
So is we remove this "soil" of support, then the terrorist has no nore teeth than the ordinary criminal, the core of the terror movement remains small, the core has difficulty moving and acting wothout being reported by good happy citizens.
When you fuck off the entire population of Arab Muslins by kicking in doors, bulldozing houses, supporting your own forms of terror and lawlessness, then you will never lose perhaps, but you will never eradicate the terrorist, because too many people have empathy for the terrorist.
Re:Let's resolve to keep our freedom. (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, Blackwater is paid for successful trips, and not fined for any feelings hurt along the way. So they use "any means necessary," even if those means are making it harder to fight the broader war. Our actual soldiers are generally much more PR-savvy, but it's hard for civvies to tell the difference between the groups. It was a pretty good argument for putting Blackwater under military command, if nothing else.
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In fact I doubt that fundamentalists will want to go anywhere. It might well be that the first interstellar colonists aren't leaving the nutbars with imaginary friends behind (sorry, I meant 'culturally diverse people with deeply held beliefs'..), instead they might be running from th
Re:a rose by another name (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm fairly sure I've seen penknives and similar things for sale in duty free as well.
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Why stop there?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Hm... (Score:5, Funny)
Coincidence?
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Sure, it is being mined... (Score:2)
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Needles, Haystacks, and Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Except that it worked? -WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? You think the red scare is what mediated this effect?
Same really with the no-fly lists. Before the no-fly lists four aircraft where hijacked, and afterwards?</blockquote>
I thought this was Slashdot, not the convention for the retarded. You got an "Insightful" rating for this garbage?
COINCIDENCE != CAUSALITY
Given the data you presented, there is no way to logically come to your conclusion! Furthermore, even if I assume just as a matter of a thought experiment, that you're correct, and the no-fly lists did prevent at least one terrorist attack, it still doesn't make them any better at all, because while the relative risk reduction may have been 100%, the absolute risk reduction would be like 0.0001%... and I am simply not willing to sacrifice much of my freedom, and a colossal amount of my money, for a tiny benefit like that.
Simply put, the cost-to-benefit ratio of these measures is totally unacceptable.
Re:Except that it worked? (Score:5, Insightful)
First let's sing that old familiar song-- "Causation != Correlation. La la la la na na."
There were 4 planes hijacked before the no-fly list. Now there's none. If you cancel the no-fly list, and a plane gets hijacked, what'll you tell people?
There were 4 planes hijacked before the Obama ran for president. Now there's none. If you don't elect Obama, and a plane gets hijacked, what'll you tell people?
Re:Except that it worked? (Score:4, Informative)
The Soviet sort of Communism is indeed on the decline. It might have been sound in theory, but it was quickly overrun by corruption (the real enemy) and the political systems evolved to counter that. You could also say that the sort "democracy" that we had in 1920 is also on the decline, and be perfectly correct in that assumption. It all depends upon how you mince your words.
China's playing it by the book. They're going through their capitalist phase (and making a killing off of it in the process). Whether or not they'll eventually close their doors and embrace "real" communism remains to be seen (although history seems to suggest this, as China's been an astonishingly introverted nation for pretty much all of recorded history up until now). If that does come to pass, it will (at least initially) be a 'very bad thing' for the rest of us, regardless of which economic religion you subscribe to.
Socialism, communism's less intimidating cousin, on the other hand, is far from dead, and has more or less been accepted in some form or another across the industrialized world (apart from the US, which has spent far too much effort fighting the reds to allow such a thing to happen). Although communism was never proven to be a successful economic system, socialist-capitalist policies (ie. nationalized healthcare) have proven to be extremely popular and successful in nations that have the economic resources to support them.
Re:Except that it worked? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you really want to argue this:
Before 2001, there were 0, repeat, 0 domestic hijackings within the United States for the previous 10 years. That is with none of these no-fly lists, nor the loss of liberties.
So, your arguement is useless as it goes on a false assumption. I would note that out of the 19 hijackers that day, most of them were already on a suspect list, and that's without "no fly" lists, warrantless wiretaps, and the like. It could be said that our overzealotness in making lists has actually increased a potential hijackers ability to "slip through" as now there's so much "noise" in the system.
The previous administration had recieved 36 terror convictions. The current? 1. Yes, read that number, 1. Our "new laws" have managed to actually decrease the number of convictions of terrorists. So, you really want to continue this arguement, or re-evaluate?
How do you figure that? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what passes as insightful nowadays? Feh!
I don't know if any reputable historians would agree with your implied premise that there was an actual, credible "communist" threat to the United States at any point in the past. If the threat never existed in the first place, it is kind of hard to disprove that drinking milk every day wasn't have an equivalent (or superior) deterrence against communism.
Assuming of course that there is an actual, credible terrorist threat...
I think a sense of proportionality is required here: there are thousands of aircraft flights in the United States every day. Over the past 10 years, exactly four flights were hijacked. On any given day in recent history, more people are killed by impaired drivers in the United States than are killed by terrorists.
And yet, some people applaud insulting and ineffectual security measures because it give the appearance that the government is doing something to protect them.
Sorry to break it to you dude, but terrorists are criminals, and the way to catch criminals is with boring, methodical police work. It's not glamorous, but it is effective. I (for one) find it hard to believe that making everyone remove their shoes at the airport has saved so much as a single life. At best, it might have given a woody to someone with a foot fetish, but that's about all that has been accomplished...
I really feel sorry that there are people out there who are so afraid that bogus security theater makes them feel safer. I hope that some day, they will realize that effective national security policies are not based on lame Hollywood movie plots.
I believe Schneier said (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you want to bet the false positive rate on that is? 99%? That's still 7,000. 99.9%? That still seems a bit high.
If your false positive rate is that high, then why even have a list at all?
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Well, at least that's what *some* people would have you think.
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Unless you're being formally charged or investigated for a crime (ie. there's a legally-issued warrant), the government has no business doing this behind our backs.
But seriously. If there really were 755,000 "terrorists" in our midst, such a high level of dissent should be a pretty clear indication that the government is doing something seriously wrong to be pissing off that many people.
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Re:I believe Schneier said (Score:5, Insightful)
Like was hinted at in the summary, I suspect this list is receiving very little human curating. My gut instinct says the names represent a 'social network' so many degrees of separation from the 'terrorists'.
I fear the 'terrorist' watch list is only the beginning. Soon we may have a 'child molester' watch list of equal accuracy, or 'gang', 'drug', 'psycho', 'medical' etc.
New Ad Campaign (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:New Ad Campaign (Score:4, Insightful)
That's only because technology has changed, and they don't have the firepower to do it. Of course they won't take a modern army head on, they'd be killed immediately. Guerrilla warfare is the only way a force with inferior firepower can hope to do damage. And guess what - it's pretty effective. Ask the Soviets. Ask the Colombians. Ask the Nicaraguans.
USA (Score:4, Interesting)
I threw the figures from the article into OO Calc quickly. It seems the rise is quite linear, and the total additions per year increasing somewhat from May 2005. Anything significant happen during May 2005 and 2007?
Let's get it over with (Score:2)
Success in this case means the numbers are high (Score:3, Insightful)
That's A Lot of Terrorists (Score:3, Interesting)
Ed Almos
Now I get it... (Score:5, Funny)
growth industry (Score:3, Funny)
The airlines are going to be pissed.
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However, if you Americans elect Ron Paul as president, the list will just disappear altogether, along with the secret military prisons and the warrantless wiretaps.
Re:growth industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? They'll still charge you for a ticket, even if they don't let you on the plane. Refund? Sorry we don't refund to "terrorists"...
Facebook 2.0 (Score:5, Funny)
We don't make mistakes (Score:3, Funny)
Surprised the list isn't bigger (Score:4, Funny)
CORRECTION: 755K *names*, not *people* (Score:4, Insightful)
Do we get the significance of that? The list is of names, not individuals. Remember Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy's little problem with the list? [washingtonpost.com]. Or how about this vicious 4 year old terrorist [blogspot.com]?
God help you if your name is John Smith, but it's probably even worse if your name is Mohammed or a variant of it. Oh, wait a second; most Islamic men's legal birth name is Mohammed.
If you want to fly without hinderance, you should probably just go ahead and change your legal name to your social security number, as it's the only way you're likely to get a unique one.
DDOS the list by overloading it? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about the duplicates? (Score:5, Insightful)
This TWL and the various hues of Terror Alert (today it is brilliant opalescent blue alert level!) are activities done by the Government to show that it is doing something. The logic behind it is not much deeper than, "We need to do something, this is something, so we are doing it."
The other tech driven legal breakdown (Score:5, Insightful)
Well there is another crisis going on that hasn't got nearly the same attention: The laws that protect our fundamental liberties are based on the assumption that suspicion is too hard to sustain for it to be used casually.
Generally speaking, placing somebody under suspicion and investigating that person is not considered a deprivation of liberty. In fact you can't have a functioning criminal legal system without suspicion and investigation, and generally the question of reasonableness isn't applied to the manner under which somebody falls under suspicion, but the manner in which the investigation is undertaken.
Suspicion and surveillance are not considered tantamount to punishment, because they are assumed to be temporary conditions. It's expensive (so the argument goes) to focus suspicion on somebody; if the suspicion is not productive, then the government surely must move its attention elsewhere, for it must have bigger fish to fry.
But what if there is a machine to the suspecting for the government? Furthermore, suppose the main expense is acquiring and maintaining the machine, and the marginal cost of adding more human grist to the mill is zero? Misplaced suspicion is no longer an inconvenience that one must bear occasionally as part of achieving a lower crime rate. It is quite feasible to make suspicion and detailed scrutiny a permament feature of someone's life. Furthermore, this can be done at no additional cost to the government, and it will surely catch at least a few additional miscreants. The entire system can operate without human effort, except to do things like additional pat downs at the airport. Many of those things are simply utilizing slack resources.
In the case of copyright, the government has given tools to private parties like the RIAA that, funded by deep pockets, can enforce and extend their economic interests. Where are the corresponding legal tools for the individual permamently and unjustly accused?
Society is divided into two groups: those who think technology is like magic, and those who understand how technology works. Of those who understand technology, some have a financial interest in technology being used more; some are simply so manifestly paranoid they have no credibility; and many, many more treat thinking about these issues as a boring waste of time. Unfortunately, big changes are coming, and in this case the paranoid people are right: they're the only one who have even considered that the changes that are coming might not be what we want.
This needs oversight and regulations (Score:4, Insightful)
There is oversight and regulations of even a completely private thing like an individual's credit history. Banks can not simply claim: "we don't like this guy" — there are laws regulating, what records can be kept, and procedures allowing people to dispute inaccuracies.
The "terror list", which, allegedly, is used to not simply cause extra scrutiny, but to also deny boarding sometimes, is maintained by the (Executive) government and is in sore need of similar regulations. As a minimum, one must be able to inquire, whether he or she are on the list and to challenge the placing both in administrative proceedings or in courts.
Because we wont cower anymore (Score:4, Informative)
Do you really think any hijacker would stand a chance on a plane anymore?
I know that I would rip the tray table off of the seat in front of me and use it as a weapon against any terrorist activity on a plane. Sure I would probably die, but doing nothing, I would probably die as anyway.
The bad guys know this. They know they cannot get control of the plane as long as one person is still alive. That is why there have been no hijackings, we would rather die fighting than cowering.
At least this isn't the UK (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with the "terrorists are evil".... (Score:3, Insightful)
Position is that I fail to see a significant moral difference between crashing a plane of passengers and handing out sanctions that only serve to starve the poor, young, old, and sick except that one takes a few thousand lives and the other may be counted in the millions.
Perhaps instead of focusing on the belief that "they are evil, plain and simple and must be extinguished" and forming our (very expensive) policies around this extremely simplistic view we should be asking ourselves "why do so many people want us dead so badly?". This is not to suggest that the blame lies on the victims of terrorism, but perhaps a change in our destructive, aggressive, and state sanctioned terrorism of 3rd world nations might wittle down the shear numbers of people who view us as evil.
For example, infant mortality has increased six-fold since 1990 in Iraq and 32% of children under 5 are malnourished. facts & myths (with citations) [leb.net]. Impacts on Iraq population since 1990 have been devastating.
There's no doubt Saddam was a classic "mad dictator", but only in his wildest dreams could he have effected the level of destruction seen over the past 17 years. Further, despite our beliefs that Iraq was a backwards nation full of dolts the population used be quite educated by global standards with literacy rates reaching the upper 80 percent. A good portion of the pop is quite aware of the US's (Rumsfield and the first Bush administration's) contribution to Saddams domination by supplying the tools needed to carry out his attacks against certain sections of the population and Iran.
I am not defending the actions of terrorists in any way, but we're making it pretty damned easy for various groups to attract new recruits.
This is the same old, same old state story (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter that the "Watch List" is useless as an actual "Watch List". It's useful because at any time, for any reason, that some state official wants to mess with you, they can say, "You're on the Watch List."
It's a control mechanism. It has absolutely nothing to do with "terrorism", just like the TSA and the rest of the pointless measures they take will never, ever have any impact whatsoever on real, live terrorists whose job it is and whose training it is to get around such measures in the first place.
Nothing the US has done since 9/11 would necessarily prevent another 9/11 - even assuming terrorists are interested in doing another 9/11. There are probably a lot of reasons an identical 9/11 hasn't occurred - reasons having nothing to do with the security measures put in place since the first one, but more to do with issues of organization, target selection, finances, redirected emphasis on other priorities, or simple disinterest. Even simple competence at pulling one off in the first place - maybe they got lucky with the first one - or more sinisterly, maybe they had help they weren't aware of to allow them to pull off the first one.
By definition, as Rutger Hauer's character said in the movie "Nighthawks", "Remember, there is no security."
Dick Marcinko used to say the same thing with regard to his Red Cell SEAL Team exercises. He pointed out that security organizations operate by checklists. They run down a checklist making sure everything is secure. He said that terrorists don't operate by checklists. They hit targets of opportunity. So his Team would just wait until the security organization went through the motions - then bypassed whatever security they thought they had and made their hit anyway using methods that either hadn't been considered in the first place or which stressed and actually made use of the security measures in place to bypass the security.
Example: an alarm system. Throw rocks at it until the numerous false alarms make the security people turn it off for repair. The very security system you're using is used to bypass it.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't have security systems. It just means you have to remember that they're only there to "keep out the riffraff." As long as your only enemies are "riffraff", they might work.
Re:While there's still time (Score:5, Interesting)
I *really* like living in a smallish city in Europe. My family is subjected to fewer of the myriad of minor prejudices that exist (compared to Atlanta). The traffic is lighter and the drivers more disciplined. Despite living in city which is supposedly 96% catholic I am not subjected to any sort of wackiness that is so popular from the religious right in the US these days. There is *no* telemarketing. I worked out a contract where I have 6 weeks paid and 12 weeks unpaid holiday. It's easy to be Green. It's easy to bicycle. It's easy to buy primarily local food stuffs. It's possible to have a mostly positive political conversation with people with significantly disparate views and no one is accused of hating Europe or Austria. No one cares what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom or wants to make a law about it. The government isn't spying on me. Public works are properly funded so we don't have bridges collapsing nor have we completely run out of water. The beer is better.
I could go on for hours...
One more thing.... The ISP with the really, really fast fiber doesn't do intrusive traffic shaping... Yet.
Bottom line there are a lot of really, really cool places in the world to live. Sure not all of them are primarily English speaking and there is no perfect place but you shouldn't let that slow you down.