We'd solve the world's energy problems if we could just harness the rotational energy coming from Orwell's grave..
New Balance Homeland security will drastically reshape American government. ...The threat that justifies what this department will do to America's political organization is biologically derived weapons. Or a radiological bomb... ...(Not that everyone believes the threat is real, as was reflected in Congress's actually fighting over whether to exempt manufacturers of antiterror vaccines from tort litigation.)... ...The money first. If the national government is going to foot most of the bills, as the already overspent states and cities want in areas such as safeguarding critical infrastructure, the feds will insist on shaping the new system in most of its significant details. There is the matter of jurisdictional control. Bear in mind that behind everything the public sector does lies a complex network of statutory authorization and law. Should one of these large-scale attacks on the civilian population become real, a cascade of hard decisions would present themselves involving such matters as quarantine, compulsory inoculations, forced population movements, property seizures, the status of infrastructure, hospital personnel, media, the deployment of police and military forces. Should looters be shot?... ...The Department of Homeland Security, incidentally, is the sophisticated solution. The crude one would be to wait for the hit, then impose martial law, for as long as necessary. Amid a biological attack, no one would question such measures. We'd muddle through. The resulting political system would be a secondary disaster.... Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110002671 Josh
[ On the night the German Parliament Building--the Reichstag-- burned down......, Started a trading day last week with this from a pal who is incensed with the Bush foreign policy: "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and then denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism..." - Hermann Göring (1945)
PHOTOGRAPHER ARRESTED FOR TAKING PICTURES OF VICE PRESIDENT'S HOTEL Posted 5 Dec 2002 06:03:48 UTC An amateur photographer named Mike Maginnis was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing. Maginnis told his story on Wednesday's edition of Off The Hook. Maginnis's morning commute took him past the Adams Mark Hotel on Court Place. Maginnis, who says he always carried his camera wherever he went, snapped about 30 pictures of the hotel and the surrounding area - which included Denver police, Army rangers, and rooftop snipers. Maginnis, who works in information technology, frequently photographs such subjects as corporate buildings and communications equipment. The following is Maginnis's account of what transpired: As he was putting his camera away, Maginnis found himself confronted by a Denver police officer who demanded that he hand over his film and camera. When he refused to give up his Nikon F2, the officer pushed him to the ground and arrested him. After being brought to the District 1 police station on Decatur Street, Maginnis was made to wait alone in an interrogation room. Two hours later, a Secret Service agent arrived, who identified himself as Special Agent "Willse." The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities" made him a threat to national security, and that he would be charged as a terrorist under the USA-PATRIOT act. The Secret Service agent tried to make Maginnis admit that he was taking the photographs to analyze weaknesses in the Vice President's security entourage and "cause terror and mayhem." When Maginnis refused to admit to being any sort of terrorist, the Secret Service agent called him a "raghead collaborator" and a "dirty pinko faggot." After approximately an hour of interrogation, Maginnis was allowed to make a telephone call. Rather than contacting a lawyer, he called the Denver Post and asked for the news desk. This was immediately overheard by the desk sergeant, who hung up the phone and placed Maginnis in a holding cell. Three hours later, Maginnis was finally released, but with no explanation. He received no copy of an arrest report, and no receipt for his confiscated possessions. He was told that he would probably not get his camera back, as it was being held as evidence. Maginnis's lawyer contacted the Denver Police Department for an explanation of the day's events, but the police denied ever having Maginnis - or anyone matching his description - in custody. At press time, the Denver PD's Press Information Office did not return telephone messages left by 2600. The new police powers introduced by the USA-PATRIOT act, in the name of fighting terrorism, have been frightening in their apparent potential for abuse. Mike Maginnis's experience on Tuesday is a poignant example of how this abuse is beginning to occur. It suggests that a wide range of activities which might be considered "suspicious" could be suddenly labeled a prelude to terrorism, and be grounds for arrest. We will continue to post updates to this story as we learn them.
Fascism finds it necessary, at the outset, to take away from the ordinary human being what he has been taught and has grown to cherish the most; personal liberty. And it can be affirmed, without falling into exaggeration, that a curtailment of personal liberty not only has proved to be, but necessarily must be, a fundamental condition of the triumph of Fascism. (Mario Palmeiri) Josh
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. " William Pitt Speech to the House of Commons "Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it." --Woodrow Wilson - from a speech in New York City, September 9, 1912 Josh
Keeping Track of John Poindexter By Paul Boutin Dec. 14, 2002 The head of the government's Total Information Awareness project, which aims to root out potential terrorists by aggregating credit-card, travel, medical, school and other records of everyone in the United States, has himself become a target of personal data profiling. Online pranksters, taking their lead from a San Francisco journalist, are publishing John Poindexter's home phone number, photos of his house and other personal information to protest the TIA program. Matt Smith, a columnist for SF Weekly, printed the material -- which he says is all publicly available -- in a recent column: "Optimistically, I dialed John and Linda Poindexter's number -- (301) 424-6613 -- at their home at 10 Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md., hoping the good admiral and excused criminal might be able to offer some insight," Smith wrote. "Why, for example, is their $269,700 Rockville, Md., house covered with artificial siding, according to Maryland tax records? Shouldn't a Reagan conspirator be able to afford repainting every seven years? Is the Donald Douglas Poindexter listed in Maryland sex-offender records any relation to the good admiral? What do Tom Maxwell, at 8 Barrington Fare, and James Galvin, at 12 Barrington Fare, think of their spooky neighbor?" Smith said he wrote the column to demonstrate the sense of violation he felt over his personal records being profiled by secretive government agencies. "I needed to call Poindexter anyway, and it seemed like a worthy concept that if he's going to be compiling data that most certainly will leak around to other departments and get used, one way to get readers to think about it was to turn that around," Smith said. What Smith didn't realize was that Poindexter's phone number and other information would end up on more than 100 Web pages a week later as others took up the cause. Phone-phreaking hackers supplied details on the Verizon switch serving the admiral's home. The popular Cryptome privacy-issues website posted satellite photos of the house. Poindexter could not be reached for comment for this story, and calls to his home phone now reach a recording: "The party you are calling is not available at this time." Since the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began awarding contracts for the Total Information Awareness project in August, the effort has been criticized by both civil rights advocates and data-mining experts. The dispute over TIA seems to fall not along straight political party lines, but between advocates and opponents of the government's right to monitor its own citizens. Former President Clinton expressed support for the project in a recent public appearance, while conservative New York Times columnist William Safire recently wrote a pointed editorial criticizing the idea. One Bush voter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the pranks on Poindexter: "If they're making him as uncomfortable as we are, good." http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56860,00.html