Civil Liberty the Next Casualty?
Misc.
'In the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, scholars fear that Americans will sacrifice civil liberties that could be difficult to win back. Many civil liberties watchdogs say freedom in the United States have been slowly eroding for the past several decades. But they say Tuesday's attacks will redouble efforts by the government to infringe on civil freedoms, and now people won't resist.'

And a specific example of this can be seen in the Wired story Congress Mulls Stiff Crypto Laws.

I'm tired. The whole nation is tired right now. And it seems crass to take a massive tragedy of the kind that we just witnessed and twist it to fit into a particular agenda. I so don't want to do that.

But my hand is forced, and the only excuse I can give is the relatively weak "I didn't start it"... but I didn't. All I can do is console myself that however crass I may feel about talking about the World Trade Center attack in conjunction with the topics of this weblog...

... it totally pales in comparision to those in Washington who are using this attack to push their anti-American agenda of control, surveillence, and random knee-jerk reactions that trade liberty for not just illusory, but non-existent safety.

I do not wish this lightly on others, but to Senator Judd Gregg and everybody else who is using this tragedy to forward their own agenda to create a police state, an incomprehensibly-larger tragedy, I hope history judges you in the harshest of lights. Perhaps these people would do us the favor of moving to Afghanistan and living in a police state for a bit, not to taste their own medicine, but to remind them exactly what we must defend: Freedom. Liberty. Justice. All the things the world they are trying to build are missing.

It's just so crass to use the tragedy this way. I actually felt cautiously optimistic after seeing the US public pull together the way they did, but the events of the last couple of days are destroying my optimism and replacing it with despair and hopelessness instead. I begin to wonder if perhaps the terrorists were right, even if their actions were horribly, horribly wrong.

To all freedom-loving peoples, whether in the United States or elsewhere, I say to you: The problem is not freedom, the problem is terrorists.