CSotD: Just dragging a few creeps away in a bus …
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Sheldon with a literary approach to the slippery-slope argument, or, from a slightly different perspective, the "How did we get here?" question.
As to the specifics here, I remain unconcerned about the massive collection of data, simply because, as said I've expressed several times, it's self-defeating on their part and has been self-defeating pretty much forever.
Certainly, their analog surveillance of my cohort in the Sixties was all but fruitless, and the fact that they can collect far more data today only makes me more confident that, having failed to find a pony under the modest pile of manure then, they now theorize that adding more manure will result in more ponies, which will then be easier to find.
I contend that it will simply hide the current ponies — and I don't deny that there are some — even better.
Which does protect our liberty in a back-handed way, though it also costs a lot of money and, if anything, diverts energy and resources that might otherwise actually make us safer from the actual terrorists.
As noted in this On The Media story and the Pro Publica piece that sparked it, claims that NSA surveillance has made us safer are largely undercut by (1) the apparently deliberate over-counting of those thwarted events and (2) that fact that, among the small percentage of those alleged threats which actually threatened the US, most were not foiled by the NSA surveillance.
For example, as Pro Publica's writer notes in that OTM interview, it wouldn't have been hard to obtain a warrant to check into an Al Qaeda operative's phones and emails.
In other cases, the lack of necessity is even more blatant: The plots were thwarted by tips from citizens or after they simply didn't work. In the case of the Times Square Bomber, a combination of the two.
And I can't help but think that maybe if the intelligence community hadn't already been collecting so much data back in 2001, they might have been lean-and-mean enough to notice and process the information they already had.
Meanwhile, the government seems now to be using its violations of the Fourth Amendment as a starting point from which to drift into violating the First Amendment.
When they get up from their computers and start running around in the three-dimensional world, I get worried.
Godwin be damned, but there was no neon sign flashing "There goes your freedom" as the brownshirts rose to power in the 1930s, and it all seemed perfectly reasonable to some perfectly reasonable people.
Who later had to explain to their grandchildren how they let it happen.
“Hitler, I am beginning to feel, is a very great man, like an inspired
religious leader — and as such rather fanatical — but not scheming,
not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really
wants the best for his country and, on the whole, has a rather broad
view.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1936
And this is where it starts to get hard to ignore, and, should we succeed in ignoring it, will, in the future, be very hard to explain:
OTM also covered this bogus violation, reported by, of all newspapers, The Washington Times – hardly a Commie pinksheet — in which one of their reporters had her notes from an series of articles critical of the federal air marshalls seized.
The pretext for this dawn raid?
Her husband had, before their marriage, been convicted of a felony and is not permitted to own guns. She, but not he, owns guns.
However, he had ordered a potato launcher, which the government claims is slang for a silencer but which she contends was, in fact, a potato launcher, which he would have kept alongside his equally deadly golf-ball launcher except that it didn't work so he threw it away.
Of course, in all fairness, there are potato launchers being sold that, with minimal adjustments, can be converted to launch tennis balls. And then there's no turning back.
Despite finding no evidence of airborne tuber capability, they took her guns because of his prior conviction, and — oh yes, by the way — they also confiscated all her notes from that critical reporting, which doesn't appear to have been relevant but was of interest to the air marshalls conducting the raid.
So, if you don't criticize the government, you have nothing to fear.
And, when I say, "criticize the goverment," I also mean "make fun of them."
Because the NSA has filed a cease-and-desist order against libertymaniacs.com, which I would note appears to be somewhere to the right of the Washington Times, over a coffeemug that dared to mock the agency.
As Robert Seigel reported on NPR, "The NSA cites a law that no one may use the words National Security Agency, the initials NSA or their seal, quote, 'in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the impression that such use is approved, endorsed or authorized by the NSA without their consent.'"
The key to this is "reasonably," because that's the factor which appears to have gone out the door of the house that James Madison built.
They came for the people with potato launchers, but I didn't have a potato launcher, so I did nothing.
Then they came for the people with wiseass coffee mugs.
I have some wiseass coffeemugs, and suddenly, uber-libertarian Frank Zappa doesn't seem as paranoid as he had appeared to be a generation ago:
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