Posted on 11/14/2002 3:44:40 PM PST by Arthur Wildfire! March
William Safire's editorial today is heating up an important debate. There are two camps: "This is war." vs. "This is Orwellian." I want to open a third camp. "This is ridiculous."
Our borders are wide open. Terrorists could blindside us at will. The foreign threats are much greater than the domestic threats in this war of terrorism. So naturally, we do NOTHING about that. Instead, we strip away our privacies. Sorry. That doesn't fly. If it were truly important to take away our privacy, the borders would have been secured a year ago.
It appears that it is easier to ask us to live in fish bowls than to tell illegal immigrants that we cannot afford to have such loose border control anymore. It appears to be a political calculation. Does that not reduce the lost privacy aspect to nothing but political calculations? Which is more important? Our safety? Or as Dick Morris says it, the 'browning of America'? But hey, the 'browning of America' ends when the borders are secure. Thus, the ridiculousness aspect only grows.
GW Bush is well intentioned, I'm sure. But his political calculations reveal that taking away our privacy can't be all that important, if he isn't willing to tick off parts of the Hispanic community by securing our borders.
This is my suggestion, for what it's worth:
1. First seal the borders.
2. Mention a timeline for this lost privacy. No 'continuation triggers' either. Settle for 4 years of this lost privacy. Then destroy the data of all non-suspects. Only keep data of suspects that is deemed worth keeping by a warrant.
3. Non-citizens can be monitored and that info can be filed at will. Americans generally would like that idea.
4. Put someone in charge other than Poindexter. Why give ammo to the desperate DNC? It makes no sense.
If GW fails to heed this advice, I forsee political havoc. And I will be a part of it.
The whole thing smells of '1984' and Big Brother.
That is a very disturbing reality. The reason why it IS disturbing is that many IT companies these days hire predomintly FOREIGN workers on the H1-B program. As such, potential ememies of the US including terrorists will have full knowledge of how the system works. It is the American people that will be left in the dark, ignorant of what events would mark them for investigation or questioning..
That's why it appears to me at least that this has less to do with tracking down terrorists than it does with tracking the activities of US citizens and could EASILY be used to silence dissent.
Forced immunizations is also the likely cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Certain childhood immunizations are also the likely cause of some cases of autism and ADD.
I've heard about some of the things you mentioned. But that's another topic entirely, deserving its own thread. :)
No...I take that back...we have to love Big Brother. That's how 1984 ends, and that's what's already beginning to happen now.
It isn't enough to take rights away...rights taken by force are reclaimed by force...you have to make people want to give them away and that's what Homeland Security is for. If people give something away willingly, only their descendants can get it back.
I feel like such an idiot now. You're absolutely right about this smacking of 1984.
First, William Saffire's column is a mish-mash of lies and distortions. The "Total Information Awareness" program has absolutely nothing to do with the "Homeland Security Bill". It is a program at DARPA - the DEFENSE Advanced Research Projects Adm. DEFENSE is not a part of the proposed Homeland Security Department.
There are privacy laws in this country that would have to be modified before anything like what Saffire is worried about could ever take place.
Before you get your shorts in a knot, go and read H.R. 5710 as passed by the House on Thursday night. Apparently Saffire hasn't.
By the way, Saffire's piece was not an "editorial". Editorials are written by the editorial board of newspapers. Saffire's piece was an op-ed column.
Haven't read that part of the bill, so I could be wrong.
Oh, well...no harm done. Just another chance to weaken the President. All the better for the Leftists and murderers..
113 posted on 11/15/2002 3:58 PM PST by Deb
The irony is, we spent a good part of this thread prior to Deb's entry figuring out exactly that. But she came in and flamed anyway. Some folks just go into attack mode whether the situation merits it or not, and that's a load of crap.
In this case, they were correct. We had a lengthy discussion on the post of Safire's column, searched high and low through the Homeland Security bill, and could only find some funding to prod companies to develop the technology required for such a database. But IMO the administrative problems for such a database are far more significant. You will literally have hundreds of thousands of data feeds into the system, if not millions. You will have to analyze each feed, load it, parse it, perform data hygiene on it, match it, dedupe it, and then build models from it. That IMO is a far more daunting task than anyone in government cares to acknowledge, and it consistent with the general approach of the feds to attempt to throw technology at administration/bureaucratic problems, with predictable results.
Hey, Deb, guess what? That was PRIOR to the passage of this law. Not a good example.
Maybe you can explain how a computer profile produced out of ramdom information and handed to an agent, would blunt his intuition?
One only needs to look at the DC sniper case, where a profile determined that the shooter was a white male, to see the inherent dangers of relying on profiling over intuition. There is a concept in modelling called segmentation, Deb - the better the model and the better the data, the more finely you can segment the population. However, the most sophisticated marketing models nowadays produce segment populations in the tens of thousands per cell, so IMO this database would not achieve the desired goals. It would instead become more of a lookup database, a tool more suited for political intimidation of individuals.
And since they must still get a judge to okay any action, how can the process do anything but help get the bad guys?
That's the point, Deb, this bill, from what some alledge, wants to eliminate the need to get a warrant to look up financial information.
Of course, the professional paranoids will scream so much about "privacy" and their "rights", that the offending proposition will be stripped from the final HS bill. And our enemies, the Democrats and the ACLU will have won a major victory against us. So don't worry, your privacy will be safe from such "unreasonable searches".
Deb, my enemies are those who trample over the Constitution seeking their goals. You fit right into that category with your blatant disregard for the 4th Amendment.
Those who are about to die, salute you.
Despicable, Deb. It was the complete lack of rights that led to millions being killed by their own governments last century. Neo-fascists like you make such possible. Oh, and BTW, they still got Moussoui following the rules, so your example was a very poor choice. Guess you'll just have to go back to flaming those who dare believe that the Bill of Rights is still the law of the land.
Gee, we spent a good part of Thursday and Friday doing just that, and I'll still posting today.
Could be I read it wrong, but that's what I saw.
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