It looks like the FBI is serious about looking for "dangerous" items on the internet, and their efforts may have some pretty strange results.
Ralph Omholt, an instructor pilot who is qualified 737s, bought a CD with flight manuals for the 737 on E-bay, and ended up getting subpoenad by a Federal Grand Jury for his efforts.
Understandably, the government doesn't want sensitive information falling into the hands of terrorists, but a flight manual? Please. As if they won't find another way to get that kind of information.
Not to mention that there a lots of people who have a legitimate need to have things like flight manuals for various aircraft -- like pilots. There are thousands of licensed pilots in this country, are they now no longer able to get information about the aircraft they fly, or dream of flying.
There have been loads of articles by and about general aviation pilots who get a chance to finally fly an airliner. Are those guys (gals) suddenly dangerous?
This isn't restricted just to aviation. What about Information Security? Do we stop discussing security holes, defects, and bugs to keep the terrorists from finding out about them? How, then, do we fix problems?
What about the people who enjoy firearm based sports? Do we keep them from competing or learning about their weapons. Do we tell them that we can't self-load their ammunition?
What about Chemistry classes? How do we keep them from learning about anything dangerous? You can do lots of nasty things with the items available to the average high school student.
The point here isn't that we should let everyone have free, unfettered access to all the information about all things -- I don't really need to know how a W-80 nuclear weapon works, but we need to do things that make sense.
Hauling a guy who buys a flight manual isn't one of them.
Welcome to Essential Liberties, formerly known as The Daily Rant. There are several reasons for the change, not the least of which being that my contract with 50megs.com runs out Dec. 31st, and they just don't allow hosting user cgi scripts, which means no blogs, for one.
The new name is derived from several factors:
1. The Daily Rant is an incredibly popular name for Blogs. Do a search and you'll see what I mean.
2. One of my friends and I had an abortive attempt at writing a book on Civil Rights in the United States that would have been called "Essential Liberties".
3. Essentialliberties.com was available.
4. Benjamin Franklin. It's one of the most overused, least understood, hackneyed, cliched phrases in our political dialogue since Septembet 11, 2001, but here goes, ""They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759
More of why "Essential Liberties" tomorrow.
This is Chris Levesques's new domain, Essential Liberties, which will serve as the home for the blog previously called "The Daily Rant."
Finally, people are starting to fight the power of large corporations by challenging the fiction that corporations have the same rights as people. In this instance, Porter Township has declared that corporations are not people protected by the Constitution. All I have to say, is that it's about damn time. If corporations had the same rights as people they would be able to vote, and Delaware would have something like a hundred electoral votes because of all the Delaware corporations registered there.
Don't get me wrong. I do think that corporations should have some rights, be protected by some form of due process, but they aren't people, and they should have no say in politics. The people who run the corporations are a different matter: if they be citizens, they can exercise all of their political rights in any way they wish...
As I noted Wednesday, the Federal Government is already using intercepted emails between individuals as fodder for harassing law-abiding citizens. Another case of government's use of protected speech against citizens involves Tom Warner, a Seattle-based activist involved in attempts to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba (we will leave all debate over the Embargo and relations to another time). Warner is being accused of traveling to Cuba and organizing a conference there, which he had no involvement with. He did, post information about the conference on his website, though, and faces fines, with no way to appeal them if he doesn't satisfy the government that he didn't go to or organize the conference.
It would seem that simply telling people about a licensed (by the U.S. government) conference, would pose no problems, and that if it did, there would be some form of due process and hope of appeal, but this appears not to be the case. This is just another case where cictizens have no rights.
On the heels of this and previous monitoring, the President is proposing additional monitoring of Internet traffic (rolled into proposals to track viruses and Denial of Service attacks). Just one more way for the government to keep an eye on what you're doing, who you correspond with, and what you buy. I'm wondering what will happen to all of this data, and when more of us will be getting knocks at our doors questioning our activities.
The next stage of round-ups have started, provoking street protests in L.A., which has seen a reported 500-700 detentions, including one of a 16 year-old who was in the country legally. The detainees are being picked up after they comply with an INS order that men from 17 mostly Muslim countries come in to be registered, with the intention of catching and tracking potential terrorists residing in the United States.
Most of those detained seem to be those whose visas have expired, but are awaiting for approval of their green cards, so the effect is that normally hard-working, law-abiding resident aliens are being scooped up under the flimsiest of excuses simply based on their nation of origin and their suspected religious affiliation.
Rather than achieve the stated goal of fighting terrorism, this new policy is likely to engender more anger at the United States from those parts of the world most likely to produce potential terrorists, because this policy represents the exact attitude toward them that is causing much of the anti-American sentiment abroad. It is a racist, bigoted policy masked in the aura of "security".
Not that the INS has not taken action against other groups of illegal immigrants in the United States, particularly those who make no pretense of being here legally: when illegal immigrants fom Mexico tried to convice the state of Colorado to extend driving privileges to them the INS didn't scoop them up and deport them. Likewise, when hundreds of illegal immigrants lined up at the Mexican embassy to get identification cards to make dealing with U.S. law enforcment easier, no INS vans or buses arrived to deport those who flouted our immigration laws. The reason? The INS claimed that they were not interested in, nor had the resources for, these types of round-ups.
The obvious answer is that the United States is not threatened by Mexican terrorists, at home, or abroad, which ultimately misses the point. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that all people withint the borders of the United States and its territories is granted equal protection under the law., whether they are citizens, non-citizens, are legal residents, or not, singling out men from one group of countries specifically goes against that. Note that this is not a restriction on immigration from these countries, it is a restriction on those who have arrived in the country legally, and are being singled out due to their origin, and based on no other criteria (other than gender -- another potential problem).
The next step for the Bush Administration is obvious - internment camps.
Lott Quits
According to CBS, Trent Lott will be resigning from his post as Senate Majority Leader. Too bad he'll still be in the Senate where he can continue to wreak harm on the nation.
Did you know that Diesel developed his engine to allow farmers autonomy by making fuel out of their crops? Neither did I, but this article says so. It also has a lot of good information on how to make your own bio-diesel, the benefits, costs, and where to get it if you want to put it in your gas tank. In California it can even be used as low-emissions fuel under state law. If I owned land, I'd be finding a way to refine and sell this stuff.
Registration at SHSU starts today, but I won't be registering for classes until tomorrow when I can speak to my graduate adviser about which classes he suggests. I'm considering the following two: The Napoleonic Wars and Ancient Warfare. Over the summer, I'll probably go after European Diplomatic History and The Civil War and Antebellum South. Such is the class load of a Military History student.
I watched the Killing Fields again last night, and I think the horror of what happened in Cambodia almot thirty years ago has finally sunk in. The first time I saw the movie in High School fifteen years ago, I don't think I was intellectually prepared to deal with what I saw. I had fully bought into the idea that genocide (of any sort) would never happen again. Recent years have proven that theory wrong on many levels.
Perhaps what affected me the most was the uneasy feeling that the re-education and labor camps could happen here, where I never believed that before. Even taking into account the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the history of the American Indian, I had always believed that, at least in America, we had gotten past all of that.
John Ashcroft and George W. Bush have relieved me ot that illusion, for which I do not thank them. The USA Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, along with Total Information Awareness and the now-defunct Operation Tips show us what our leader's vision is. According to some reports, Mr. Ashcroft wants to set up camps for Americans he deems "dangerous", but have committed no actual crime. Mr. Bush obviously believes that the government has some right to spy on Americans who have committed no crimes and are not under suspicion of having committed crimes. If this account is in anyway accurate, the U.S. Secret Service has moved whole-heartedly into making the new American police-state a reality.
In the words of a friend, "...maybe we haven't been paranoid enough."
So, our beloved, un-elected fearless leader has decided to deploy an expensive missile defense system that doesn't work to "protect" the United States from nuclear attack. If it weren't for all his buddies in the military aerospace field I wouldn't understand at all, particularly since the only three countries with ICBMs aren't likely to attack each other, and it is questionable whether one of them (Russia) could even fire any of its weapons. The real nuclear threat (other than from the White House) is from a small group of nut cases, or in the medium range weapons, which can't reach the Unites States. Like I said, it only makes sense one way.
It isn't helped by the fact that the system is based on some pretty bad technology (for its purpose). We might as well be using jumped up Patriot missiles or the Navy's SM-2, both of which are designed to engage relatively low-speed airplanes and cruise missiles. Even if you think we need Missile Defense, this isn't the right tool or the right program.
If we are to plunge ahead with sort of thing, we should use space-based weapons that at least give us other useful technologies like inexpensive access to space, which NASA isn't going to give us. And, yes, I understand all of the arguments against the militarization of space, but the fact of the matter is that someone will do it sooner or later, and when that happens, being behind the learning curve is going to be a huge problem.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Bush Administration's foreign policy decisions the past couple of weeks, and I don't like my conclusions. None of my thoughts are earth shattering or even all that original, though.
The President has made a big deal about his policy of "Preemptive Strikes" against nations that present a threat to the United States. It's obvious that this philosophy falls under the pseudo-macho heading of "the best defense is a good offense" category. It is also patent nonsense.
I'll be the first to say that I want a strong military and that preparedness and vigilance are an absolute necessity in the face of foreign threats. The next thing I'd say is that you don't attack other nations unless they attack you first, or at least declare war on you. The Bushistas want us to do just that, based entirely on "intelligence" information that is too sensitive to be released, that will never be presented to anyone in Congress, or shown to our allies. We'll just have to trust him.
A word about "trust" and the current administration: Dick Cheney refuses to obey court orders to release information about his "National Energy Task Force", the President has systematically gutted the Freedom of Information Act, the existence of the "Shadow Government" after September of 2001, Operation TIPS, the Office of Information Awareness, the presence of convicted felons (and liars to Congress) Poindexter and Abrams, and the appointment of Henry Kissinger (liar, deceiver, conniver) to investigate the intelligence failures of 2001. Sure, we should trust these guys.
The hypocrisy inherent in the Bush plan is obvious: we can attack sovereign nations that we fear, but they have no right to attack us if our policies threaten them. Republics don't operate in this fashion, this is the method of Empires and totalitarian regimes, which says a lot of bad things about where we are heading as a nation.
So the President yearns for a return to days when all nations claimed the right to attack all others on the smallest of pretexts, which is bad enough. The next part of his foreign policy that is particularly problematic, is the directive to the CIA to attack al-Qaeda wherever they may be.
The CIA's hunt for al-Qaeda has already claimed the life of one U.S. citizen during a missile attack in Yemen. Ignoring the implicit violation of Yemen's sovereignty here, the life of an American has been taken by the United States government without any indication that he had ever been investigated, tried, subpoenaed, arrested, or indicted. The Bush response to a possible Constitutional issue? "there is none".
The CIA's mandate for the President more or less tells them to seek out and kill any al-Qaeda operative they find, anywhere in the world. There is no exception made for the United States, so it's possible that the CIA could be targeting someone near you based on the smallest of information. You or your neighbors could be killed by the federal government with no trial, no evidence, no oversight, and no appeal. This may be the extreme view of their instructions, but it could happen.
The message here? Be afraid. It is the policy of our government that it can attack anyone, anywhere, at any time. How long before other governments follow our lead?
On Friday the group I'm in at work took a tour of New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins. Not only do they make good beer, but they do everything possible to reduce their impact on the environment, including using light tubes for lighting during sunny times of year, using outside air during winter for cooling refrigerated areas of their operation, reclaiming water for reuse in different processes, purchasing office furniture made of recycled product making use of natural lighting, etc...
Their beer is made of the old fashioned way, so you need to drink it fresh -- shelf life is about 90 days. Check them out.
It's official, starting January 15th, I'll starting to work on a Master's degree in History with an emphasis in Military History at Sam Houston State University. No, I'm not moving to Huntsville, Texas, I'm doing the whole thing online, which is a great convenience when you have to work full-time.
This marks my return to school after a significant hiatus. I dropped out of a previous graduate program at the University of South Florida several years ago after a couple of semesters of thrashing about futily when I got to my thesis. I'll keep everyone update on how things go.