Wired News: Bush OKs Smut-Stripping Tech
I see. It is quite alright to cut and paste a copyrighted work without the owner's permission as long as the result makes the government happier. It is alright to make the devices we use to find and view information and entertainment enforce government notions of what we should or should not see or hear. Do we consumers get to play? Can we remove types of comercials and political messages that offend us? No?
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Friday, April 22, 2005
CNN.com - U.S., Canada eye overflight lists - Apr 22, 2005
Exactly how does this make sense? Pesumably the means employed to insure persons on planes cannot do major damage is already quite good. So how does it aid anything legitimate to also insist that planes flying over US territory must not contain any person on a US watch list? These lists are quite problematic in that the criteria for placing persons on such a list and for challenging inclusions of persons on the list has not been worked out. Persons have been put on the list and have found it very difiicult to get off the list who are no threat and who there was no reason to put on the list in the first place. Now we are asked to not only countenance such lists that provide only very marginal additional security but to apply them to all flights from all countries that overfly the US.
It is high time we stopped resoponding in knee jerk ways to pressings of the fear button and instead applied a bit of analysis of costs including costs in restricted freedom, loss of privacy, danger of arbitrary de facto unanswerable persecution versus actual benefit in increased safety.
Exactly how does this make sense? Pesumably the means employed to insure persons on planes cannot do major damage is already quite good. So how does it aid anything legitimate to also insist that planes flying over US territory must not contain any person on a US watch list? These lists are quite problematic in that the criteria for placing persons on such a list and for challenging inclusions of persons on the list has not been worked out. Persons have been put on the list and have found it very difiicult to get off the list who are no threat and who there was no reason to put on the list in the first place. Now we are asked to not only countenance such lists that provide only very marginal additional security but to apply them to all flights from all countries that overfly the US.
It is high time we stopped resoponding in knee jerk ways to pressings of the fear button and instead applied a bit of analysis of costs including costs in restricted freedom, loss of privacy, danger of arbitrary de facto unanswerable persecution versus actual benefit in increased safety.
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