Posted on 08/11/2006 10:28:49 PM PDT by DannyTN
(TV5) -- While FBI agents pour into Caro another incident breaks out in Gratiot County. At approximately 11:35am August 11th police were called to the Dollar General Store in Ithaca after a" clerk in Ithaca became suspicious after two men came into the store, and became upset when they were turned down while trying to buy several disposal cell phones.
TV5's Mike Terry spoke with the clerk who called police. She said they were two "Middle Eastern" men and said they've been coming into the store weekly and buying disposable cell phones. She said the same thing was happening at the dollar general store in Alma.
You might think the clerk became suspicious because of what was going on in Caro but when we asked the clerk she said she wasn't even aware of what was going on.
The policy at their store is that they can only sell two cell phones, per person, per day. She saw the men put the phones in the trunk of the car and when she thought they were coming back in, she called 9-1-1.
We did talk to Ithaca police while there has been no crime committed-they do want to find these men, and run their names against government watch lists.
The problem with Tracphones is that they don't really have roaming per se. They (Tracphone) have contracts with all the service providers and buy huge blocks of minutes at an enormous discount that they then re-sell as regular minutes that the customer buys for the phone. I could purchase a Tracphone in Kalamazoo, drive to Denver before ever turning it on and go through the activation process using the service of a local Denver carrier. This would not show up as the phone roaming in Denver, nor would it show as the phone being "home" if it was taken back to Kalamzoo. There is not really a "home" market for Tracphones, they just work as long as you buy minutes for them and as long as there is compatible service in the area.
Neither can a cellphone battery. What are they, 600MAH? Hardly in the same league as those big generators you see in the movies -- the boxes with the handle on top of the plunger that they push down, or so I'd think. (I can't buy the notion that those two-handed push-generators only put out 600MAH!)
But since you're in the biz, you tell me -- what can you set off with a 600MAH battery? (And remember, the PHONE will be drawing some of that current too, reducing the amount available for bad stuff.)
I didn't say that it couldnt be used as a timer in a larger, bulkier systm.
Well, I'd have thought you'd have known this, what with you being in the biz and all that, but once they decide to rig it up to a bunch of explosives, they've already committed to a "larger, bulkier system."
Sheesh. Talk about splitting hairs. We have crazed jihadis willing to self-detonate with a pushbutton switch for a "timer", and people are arguing that they won't use watch-timers because it'd require an extra battery. Hello???? They are ALREADY using "bigger batteries" with the CELLPHONES. Did you read that they are removing the STANDARD batteries? Do you think they are gonna build something that will need to be recharged once or twice a day? Of course not! They are pulling the batteries, and it is pretty obvious that they'll rig the phones up to big batteries. Batteries (i.e., alkaline D cells) are readily available, cheap, and can be ganged up to provide whatever voltage and current is necessary to keep the thing running for as many days/weeks/months as they want.
Do you really think they're gonna say, "Oh, dear, we can't get cellphones anymore, and if we use a generic timer, it'll mean using a bigger battery! Oh dear, woe is us, what shall we do, Allah (pbuh)?"
LOL!
This is WAR, not a card game! They are not constrained by some arcane rule that says "Nope, you can't use a bigger battery. Tough break!" They will do whatever they can get away with. And in a free country, that's plenty.
The solution is not to restrict "stuff". The solution is to restrict THEM!
Did you ("you" = the readers of this thread) know that not too long after 911, the federal government, largely, IIRC, at the behest of Colin Powell, initiated a program to attract MORE Muslims -- from Arab nations in the Middle East? Fast track immigration, the whole nine yards. They were pretty open about promoting it, too. They were proud of it.
They wanted to show 'em that we really believed that TROP business. Wanted to make sure they LIKED us.
Gee, I wonder how many of the jihadis currently scurrying about on the Tracfone Spree came into the country as a result of that program?
But I digress, a little.
The problem is NOT telephones. The problem is the jihadi BUYING the telephone. If he can't buy a telephone, he'll buy something else. And if all else fails, he'll climb into a suicide belt and scrape two wires together and blow himeself up (if they ban SWITCHES, as a last ditch resort to "stop terrorism").
We are watching -- in speeded-up motion -- a rerun of the whole gun control debate! Only this time, it's the conservatives who are focusing on the THINGS rather than the CRIMINALS using the things!
England, Australia... they banned guns. Crime -- bloody, ugly, violent crime went UP!
Now they're banning knives -- even going so far as to restrict kitchen cutlery!
But, they will NOT go after the scumbags USING the knives!
Madness... sheer madness.
But, no madder than the notion that by banning telephones, we can prevent terrorists from blowing stuff up.
Same misguided logic, the main difference is that this time it's OUR side singing the Brady Ballad.
Pinch me, wake me up!
The system as a whole has to know how many minutes the phone has. Thus in one or the other manner there is a central point of contact.
What happens with "most normal cell phone owners" is irrelevant. If someone is going to have to run a check where they didn't previously run a check, then we are reducing freedoms and inconveniencing ourselves. While I have a regular cell phone, the idea of the disposables is nice. In an age where identity theft is a bigger and bigger problem, the idea of having my cell phone set up in a way that doesn't leave a paper trail appeals to me. If I choose to take advantage of that freedom, that freedom should be available to me regardless of what "most" people do.
Nonsense. That's exactly the kind of crap the new York Slimes has been selling by revealing all the secrets about our intelligence services tracking financial records and phone calls of the Al Quaeda vermin to Al Quaeda. We absolutely need to do that.Without those, we'd be having another 9/11 this very week. What's the use of "freedom" when you are blown up on a plane in the mid-Atlantic?
Nonsense yourself. Now you're just twisting my words to justify your own anti-freedom beliefs. I have nothing against tracking the terrorists bank accounts or the phone calls that we know that they've made. If the technicalities of the law allow the government to prosecute the press for revealing what the government is doing, I believe in full prosecution of those in the press who publish secrets.
Let me try to explain my position again, and maybe this time you'll understand it clearly. Have you ever heard of the saying that those who trade freedom for security will have neither? I think Ben Franklin made that statement, but sometimes these sayings are falsely attributed. I believe the exact saying may even say that those who would make that trade deserve neither freedom nor security. That's part of what's happening here. You are arguing that we give up freedom in order to have security. I'm saying that we lose that trade whether we live or die.
You are trying to present a scenario where our options are to lose freedoms or die in a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean. Your very dismissal of the importance of freedom proves that this is your attitude. My point is that there is another and better path. That path is to kill the terrorists and to kill as many as we have to kill in order to make ourselves safe. That's how our ancestors secured the freedoms that we have today. If we aren't willing to do the same thing, we won't be leaving any freedoms for those who follow.
Bill
Thanks!
As Rube Goldberg as $3 worth of Radio Shack parts and a high school knowledge of electronics.
-you buy cards that add minutes on to the ones that come with the phone......you don't litterally throw the phone away...it just cannot be easily traced as you don't sign your life away with a contract. The phones are cheap versions of the expensive ones, but not to throw away that quickly.
That's true, and that is probably the only way you would be able to go about it. Whether or not they could dump them all at once would depend on the ESN's of the phones they wanted to shut down all being in sequential order or all within a certain range of numbers. Otherwise, it would be one at a time, unless you just shut everyone down regardless.
I'm sure that the cell phone companies would love to re-engineer their phones to make their use in bombing less likely. I don't think that the Ryder truck company ever fully recovered from the Oklahoma City bombing, and I'm sure that the cell phone people don't want to suffer a similar fate.
I don't like the thought of having lines of communication cut off at all. For every person you save by cutting off the phones to stop the terrorists' activities, you may cost someone else by delaying or inconveniencing the response.
Again, the balance should not be between freedom and security. There is no safety in security. The balance needs to be between safety and how many of our enemies we need to kill to achieve that safety. You talk about putting our enemy down, and I'm saying that the first response to every one of these incidents should be to put more of our enemies down. I want to see the government saying, "Look, we're going to ban liquids for a few days or maybe weeks. We're going to destroy our enemies, and then we're going to get things back to normal. It's unreasonable to prevent someone from carrying contact lens cleaning solution in their carry-on luggage. It's unreasonable to keep someone from carrying a little bottle of Visine eye drops. It's unreasonable to keep someone from carrying a bottle of shampoo. When we go back to normal, we're not going to call it 'getting lax' and pretending that normal is bad. We're going to get back to normal proudly as a sign to our enemies that we will do whatever is necessary to maintain our safety and our conveniences."
Bill
Bill
Thanks!
Police bomb experts think one phone may be the trigger, but using two is common. Now, combine all these phone discoveries in the past week (over a thousand) and you've got at least 500 potential bomb detonation devices ready to go. Put that on a larger scale... Let's say that those 500 bombs kill only 10 people each. You now have an event that surpasses 9-11.
Yep. And walmarts are everywhere in Michigan. What scares me most is that high school, college and pro football season is here. Again, 500 bombs killing just 10 people each would surpass 9-11.
It's reasonable to develop means to sniff out the explosives or likely precursors. Which would mean you couldn't pack your peroxide (it would ding the sensor), but nobody would care about your Visine or shampoo.
I still want to know if that airline list is the same airline that the securtiy person in London worked for- or if that list came from that guy.
My problem with so much of what I see today is that we aren't making temporary sacrifices to defeat an enemy completely even at the cost of some collateral damage. Instead, we refuse to do anything that generates collateral damage and accept the loss of our freedoms as a normal and permanent change. That change won't win the war or keep us safe.
On a side note, the diet and exercise analogy really doesn't fit. In the case of diet and exercise inconvenience versus heart health, the issue is a personal issue of risk, cost, and consequence for each individual. As long as the government isn't involved, each individual can and should weigh the risks and rewards of each lifestyle and make personal choices.
Bill
Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my ‘miscellaneous’ ping list.
Where is Tesla when we need him?
The whole story is here..but it may be one of many many incidents...I truly hope law enforcement is on this.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060812-083840-1681r
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