You have two assholes. One is a citizen, he’s got the right to be an asshole. They other is a public servant. He doesn’t (or shouldn’t) have the right to be an asshole.
In the grand scheme of history, in the great wash of the collective American cosmos, in the midst of the day to day howls and earth rattles of towering financial and political giants, many of us tend to see ourselves as “the little people”. We consider ourselves inconsequential in the wake of epic events that appear to rise and fall like irregular tides and determined by some frenetic force of chance; a great cultural roulette wheel. In fact, we are often encouraged to emulate this belief. Better to roll with the river of difficult times than to fight against the current in a fruitless attempt at changing its direction. Better to let more important and more powerful men blaze the trails that we will later follow, right…?
Human beings have a strange attachment to the concept of the “decision makers vs. the decision followers”, even in the U.S. The Declaration of Independence was meant to herald the birth of a society which dissolved the separation between the rulers and those who are ruled. Our country was built upon the premise that every citizen has a right to participate in the making of his own providence, to play a part in the decisions that directly or indirectly affect his future. Of course, those were the days when average Americans saw themselves as giants, as innovators of history, not as little people.
As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.
American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.
The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported on July 25 that “there are 72 fusion centers around the nation, analyzing and disseminating data and information of all kinds. That is one for every state and others for large urban cities.”
What is a fusion center?
The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.
According to a Free Keene report, well known libertarians Rich Paul and Capuzzo, along with a female named Jackie, were arrested while "traveling through the police state of Massachusetts" on June 30.
They were apparently charged with possessing cannabis and a firearm.
The report did not mention that any crime had been committed, only that the trio had some plant material and a tool.
They may also have been in possession of other comparable inanimate objects, such as a cotton shirt or a ballpoint pen, but no other information is currently available.
Everyone knows by now that BP is still blocking press access to oil-spill sites even though they're not supposed to anymore. I’ve been blathering about it for weeks, and it’s been all of three days since four contractors wouldn’t let me through the Pointe Aux Chenes marina outside Montegut, Louisiana. And though as of June 16 the federal government was saying helicopters could fly reporters as low as 1,500 feet around spill sites, on June 17 I was on a helicopter that was prohibited from flying below 3,000 feet (and whose pilot flipped silent birds at the "military guys" coming over the radio and hassling him about being in the area at all). But Louisiana state police pulling over a video camera-wielding private citizen because the head of BP security wanted to ask him some questions is a whole other level of alarming.
Joe Lieberman: China can shut down the Internet, why can’t we?
Who else but Joe Lieberman would introduce a bill to give the President the power to shut down the Internet with the flick of a switch? I’m afraid of the answer to that question, and you should be, too. However, it’s hardly surprising America’s premierauthoritarianwarmonger – author of a bill that would strip American citizenship from anyone even vaguely suspected of “terrorism” – would come up with a scheme like this.
If the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act” passes – and isn’t that a name that embraces practically every collectivist bromide extant? – the Department of Homeland Security would establish a “cyber-terrorism” sub-bureaucracy, the Office of Cyberspace Policy (OCP), and the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communication (NCCC), with the former lording it over the Internet – a Cyber-Czar – and the latter unleashed to spy on and otherwise guard the “cybersecurity” Senators Lieberman and his two co-sponsors aver is imminently threatened.
