perfidy

In response to Johno's recent post, I have this to say: 

What kind of commie, pinko, terror-loving, raghead son of a....

Wait, what I meant to say was that he is exactly right.

David Brin has talked a lot about this, as well. Not so much about the Patriot Act in particular, but about what the most effective defense is. He believes, as I do, that an empowered and informed citizenry is the most effective defense. A distributed defense far more effective and responsive than anything the goverment could create by restricting our freedom. One might even say it would be... a general militia.

Two things - the events on flight 97 on the day, and the sniper madhunt in DC. The passengers on flight 97, in 90 minutes, used advanced communications technology and their own initiative to discover the intentions of the hijackers, formulate a plan, and foil the plot. Their example has made it unlikely that any American airliner will ever be hijacked again. Sadly, they lost their lives, but the principle still holds.

In the DC sniper situation, the police attempted to withhold critical information. The snipers were only caught when information accidently leaked, and a citizen put it all together and the suspects were arrested while sleeping in a rest area.

We are the first line of defense. In a terror war, we are on the front lines. Things like the Patriot Act are reprehensible not so much for infringements of our liberty, though they are guilty of that, but because they are ineffective. They get in the way of a proper defense. They try to sustain the myth of government omnicompetence.

We should not be reporting information to be collected in government deebees, there to be pondered by "experts," classified, and never to see the light of day unless the information gets in the hands of the DEA and some pot grower gets arrested.

The government should be releasing information to us. Websites tracking the activities of suspected terrorists should be published. The same monomaniacal geeks who engage in anal retentive fact checking of Michael Moore movies or Wolfowitz speeches could go nuts. Instead of a few government experts, you'd have thousands of people examining the data, weeding out the chaff, and forming consensus on the rest.

And if those fuckers ever come here, their faces would be all over the web.

These ideas would provoke horror in the minds of most bureaucrats. But stuff like that will be necessary, before too long. And in the long run, its the only way we can preserve our liberty and our security.