What do you folks think about this alleged terrorist with his alleged plans to bomb us with a "dirty bomb"?

Do Strangelove and Co. deserve our blessings for protecting us from this heinous killer (if he is one), or do they deserve our wrath for implementing the PATRIOT Act on an American citizen--an act they swore would never happen when the act was passed and signed?

If this guy never stands trial, how do we even know that he's not just a scape goat to further stir up our anger and fear, for the purpose of our accepting even more unconstitutional intrusion into our privacy.

I just read of a Lou Harris poll which says that a huge number (wish I had the article handy) of US "citizens" are willing to sacrifice their rights to receive "more security", and an even larger number (80+/- percent, I think) support a national ID card with fingerprints. What a bunch of wimps!

"Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin

-- joj (jump@off.c), June 13, 2002

Answers

Let me be the first to share my ignorance with you all ? on this subject.As far as B. Franklin goes , this was a man who used to import Bull dogs from England for his unusual hobby of dealing with uncooperative Native Americans. Ben along with his pals would take packs of trained dogs to the native villages to kill and mame rebel natives , children and old people included.It wouldn't surprise me if Ben and his buddys placed bets to see which dog would kill which kid as they fled in terror for their lives.Bad people saying good things is meaningless. What were his motive when he said these nice words about liberty, was he trying to pursuade people to see a point he was trying to make? Was it said with a self-serving motive ?Or is it from the B. Franklin collection of poems. As for the "Dirty Bomber " , Fear is a great weapon, and the phsycology police are feeding us ,what they want us to eat.Only the ones feedig us this news knows what the true ingredients are .We are being bombed with disinformation. It's been very effective from what I've read on more populated forums. Some have their tails between their legs , others are froating at the mouth and are ready to kill.These news reports seem to be designed to disorientate people and take them from their center ( that place of calm ,Humans need to make correct decisions. I think people are losing balance lately and can't tell up from down.I feel some of these fear tactics are replacing the old ones. Remember when there were nuclear bomb drills in school and students were told to hide under the desk , like that would protect someone from a nuclear bomb.They even had a poster in the old, so called head-shops that would tell you how to prepare for a nuclear bomb, the last line was "put you head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye".As far as the constitution goes no man made paper or laws can give or take away the rights I only expect and accept from my creator.I don't impose my rules on others on this sphere called earth and those who impose their rules on me , even if they say they''ll give me liberty and freedom are bullies. Who gave a man the authority to give me liberty or freedom? So if they bully me out of the rights and liberties they supposenly gave me,they will deal with my creator. I won't submitt to or resist them, I without fear will hold my center and do as I've always done live in peace and do my chores till my time on earth has been served .I won't fight and become like the ones that sow violence on the earth.They can't controll I and make me be like them ..The only weapon they don't have is a heart,it's the only weapon that will protect a person.

-- SM Steve (Unreal@msn.com), June 13, 2002.

Some of what I wrote above was inspired by the new freedom self reliance. Suggestions and talk of how a future uprising by Americans to defend a constitution given by man under WHO"S authority, might make things better in the U.S. is fruitless thinking that has been instilled in people by the Controllers.Even the Jesus followers have seemed to have lost their way and are speaking against their own religion and are speaking of living by the sword .

-- SM Steve (unreal@msn.com), June 13, 2002.

For a free society to be successful,the citizen must live by a code of honor and respect for ourselves as well as others .When a large enough portion of the population loses honor and respect,the society starts to crumble.To keep the society from falling apart, freedoms are taken away. There was a time when a small farmer could set bags of fruit on a road side stand, with a sign that told the price of the fruit and a place to leave the money. The farmer could be doing other chores and even make a run to town and not worry about his money or fruit being stolen.Try that now and see what happens.Because so many U.S. citizens have mistaken freedom for a crimminals paradise,the freedoms are slowly disappearing.Total blame on the government is unjustifiable. Ater a highly destuctive hurricane I went through outside the U.S. in a rural area, my distant neighbors came banging on my door the following day.They came to make sure I was OK and that I had enough water and food to hold me til things were back to normal.No curfews were put in affect no national guards were needed. Even in the main cities near by . When Miami was hit by hurricane Andrew,looting broke out,people had to guard their supplies and possesions with rifles, there were curfews and the national guard was called in to try to keep order.A curfew takes away freedom.Was the government wrong to take away freedom in this case.I don't believe so. Should we let the "Dirty Bomber" out on bail because his rights were violated.I think he gave up his citizenship the day he joined the anti American group he became part of .That's if it is true that he did what was claimed. A society that abuses it's freedoms will soon lose them.

-- SM Steve (Unreal@msn.com), June 14, 2002.

SM Steve, I'm not sure why it matters to you whom I picked to make my point, whether it be Ben Franklin Ghandi, or Jesus Christ. The point was the point, not the speaker of the point.

I also did not post this to encourage you to get on a holier than thou soap box. :~(

I won't address all the thumping points you made, as I learned long ago that logic and thumpers do not mix. However, on this point, ".To keep the society from falling apart, freedoms are taken away." I would like to say that Ashwipe did not go after our freedoms because society was falling apart, but rather because he want's to remake it in his own image. He wants to be the supreme being of the world, starting with the US. Hell, he can't even let us Oregonians pass our own laws without illegally stepping in and trying to overturn them. What a butt. What an Ash.

-- joj (jump@off.c), June 14, 2002.

I wish I knew how the wording of the poll went. Polls are often terribly misleading. At anyrate, the Franklin quote is perfect, and you have no choice but to fight to have any semblence of freedom, no matter how deep your illusion is...

-- Doreen (bisquit@here.com), June 19, 2002.

Hi, Doreen, Here's a little bit of info that might help. I still don't know how the questions were phrased, though. I appreciate you're asking, as I hadn't given that any thought. I suppose the pollsters could say something like, "would you prefer having your wife and kids drawn and quartered, or would you prefer a national id?

Monday, November 19, 2001

Hang on to freedom and security Chaim Yudkowsky  

"People who are willing to give up freedom for the sake of short-term security, deserve neither freedom nor security."

As the country and civilized world reacts to the barbaric terrorist attacks on civilians, I am reminded of this quote. Reading it, one wonders if they are the words of a reactive radical, a contemporary civil libertarian, or someone who simply loves the freedom that American style liberty represents. Before disclosing its author though, let's examine the state of privacy today in light of those attacks.

Before attack. Even before the attacks, eroding freedom of privacy has evolved over the last half century as a result of enabling technology. The capacity to gather, store, and analyze all types of data about people, individuals and groups, has been a boon to both commercial and government users of that data. This ability has come to affect us on and off the Web, in the most insidious ways. The invasions of the privacy, that citizens of the United States are assured of, has been the ideological issue in the debate of red-light cameras, cameras in high crime neighborhoods, the federal government's eavesdropping initiative on e-mail and domestic wireless communication (known as Carnivore), and even the debate of the invasion of the bedroom. Nonetheless, not only has it made marketers more adept at niche mass marketing, but it has also made us more adept in identifying and preventing many forms of criminal activity.

During this time and before Sept. 11, the daily impact of the publicly available knowledge about any individual has progressed at a terrifying rate. The best example of what that means is something a single friend told me. She explained that when well-meaning friends present prospective blind dates to her, she uses the Internet to perform information reconnaissance. Using a number of free Web sites, she learns quite a bit of truth about these young men. (You now how well-meaning friends can insolate the truth in dating.)

After attack. Since Sept. 11, we have come to realize that despite losing control over our information, we are still not feeling safe. Thus, many of us believe that if we cede even more of our privacy to the government, we will feel and be safer. While businesses and private citizens may have a moral albeit not necessarily legal responsibility to enforce assurances of privacy, these privacy protections are clearly imposed upon government by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Nonetheless, of late, our citizens are supportive of stripped protections. I've just pulled some examples from recent surveys and articles.

• A study by Harris Interactive, after Sept. 11, showed that more than 50 percent of Americans believe that law enforcement agencies should be granted more power to better combat terrorism in a number of areas including more camera surveillance of public places and more monitoring of cell phones.

• That study also showed 86 percent in favor of using facial recognition software to scan people at public locations and events.

• An ABC-Washington Post survey showed that 66 percent of Americans were "willing to surrender civil liberties to stop terrorism."

• "I strongly advocate issuing National Identity Cards." So wrote a Jewish columnist who has conveniently forgotten the German yellow star. Interestingly, 68 percent of those surveyed in the Harris poll were in favor of this for all U.S. citizens.

• The Baltimore Sun reported, "America's secret court gets new power to fight terror."

• Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department attorney, was quoted as saying, "Americans appear to be more willing to tolerate much greater intrusions ... now."

• Robert Pitofsky, former Federal Trade Commissioner, was quoted as saying, "Terrorists swim in a society in which their privacy is protected."

Lack of privacy is the Orwell warning of 1984 that many would say is an impossible extreme for society. Indeed, aside from the provocative thought it encourages, his model of a repressive and oppressive society is inconceivable to us. Nevertheless, world history and experience of governmental interference in personal and business life is precisely what led our country's early leaders to promise the citizenry of the new country that we shall not repeat the abuses of another time.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that loss of our privacy will be abused by most of our law enforcement officers or employees of other regulatory agencies. But even in the freedom of this country, abuses are possible by renegade employees who subvert new powers to their own ends. There are a myriad examples of substantive abuses by government employees of powers defined. Let's not forget the Congressional Hearings about an IRS that was out of control, or the claims about big city Police Departments that were out of control over the last two decades. Again, even with new diminished privacy, police state is not likely, but overzealousness is. Who could forget the poor guard in Atlanta who was persecuted wrongly for a bomb in Olympic Park.

Our society has established significant measures to balance individual and group rights and our reaction to serious risks to those balances should not be permitted to erode what little remains of our privacies in technologically sophisticated times. What to do?

• Encourage our legislators not do away with freedoms others have died to provide us with.

• Demand that legislators take responsibility for any privacy reducing law; this means enacting laws that will not likely be abused and insist on their repeal if they are. According to the Cato Institute, asset seizures that were legalized in the war on drugs have been used to strip thousands of innocent Americans of assets without proof of wrongdoing.

• Courage and patriotism is ideology, not just waving the flag. Be bold in balancing the long-term impact of relinquishing rights with short-term security gains.

• Commit to a renewed corporate interest in maintaining employee and customer information in confidence; not exploiting it to the highest bidder. Think back to the openendedness privacy statements that you received from financial institutions earlier this year.

• Expect and demand our privacy. We are losing it, because we no longer expect it.

• Be very careful in the adoption of with new technologies including global positioning, smart cards, and data mining tools.

By the way, in case you were curious, the author at the beginning of this column was this Benjamin Franklin. Yes, the same Mr. Franklin famous as statesman, author, and inventor. I am sure he would say, as did Dennis Burke in USA Today, "Now we must choose between safety and freedom, we must not flinch if freedom means anything."

© 2001 American City Business Journals

-- joj (jump@off.c), June 21, 2002.