Category Archives: Grim Meathook World

Waterfront property at low tide

Now with ultra-cool updates at the bottom!

So I managed to set off the explosives detector at CYEG this afternoon on my way home. It was, to say the least, a humiliating experience, enhanced only by the frustration that I was late for my flight. Why my bag was randomly chosen to be explosive-residue-tested is a bit of a mystery; my laptop, the usual suspect for this kind of thing, wasn’t in there at all, and when they swabbed the bag I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, I use a totally different bag to carry my Semtex around.

Apparently, though, when the explosive detector is activated, you get to get super-duper screened. Which involves a physical search of everything you’re bringing with you. And a physical search of yourself, which is sufficiently thorough that I think someone owes me breakfast. And, as with everything involving the government, there’s paperwork to fill out. Name. Address. Birthday. Occupation. It goes on and on. I asked what was going to happen to the form. “Oh, nothing,” the guy said a little too nonchalantly for my tastes. Yeah, right. And if you believe that one…

So I totally won’t be shocked that I’m now tagged and will get nailed every time I go to get on a flight from hereon in.

The punch line is that my bag tested positive for nitroglycerine residue. Which is, in hindsight, totally not unexpected, since it has been home to several bottles of nitro spray that at one point or another have found their way into my pockets and then into my bag. (Don’t look at me like that — I’m not stealing the damn drug. It’s just that it’s frequently easier to shove them in a pants pocket rather than keep fishing for one at the bedside or whatever, and besides, we’ve now gone to single-patient use sprays so that once you use one on one patient, it’s fininshed.) Whether one discharged, or leaked, or whatevered in my bag, it somehow got NTG molecules all over the place, and that’s what the detector picked up. The guy said this happens all the time but I’m not so sure, and in any event I’m not even remotely certain how I could go about getting the NTG residue off my bag so this doesn’t happen in the future. NTG spray has a pretty distinctive smell. All I can smell in my bag is consumer electronics, so it must have been some minute amount somewhere.

The worst part of it all is that I can’t even make snide jokes about the total uselessness of the air travel security theatre, since spotting passengers with explosives is, uh, kind of what you want the security theatre to be doing. Must.. find.. useless government joke.. in here.. somewhere..

Some time after I posted this, Bruce Schneier happened upon it and posted an excerpt on his blahg. There were a few things that came up in the comments to his post that I wanted to address, so I’ve re-posted my own follow-up here.

First of all, please understand that my post was not intended as a commentary on air travel security. I have a personal habit of having horrible things happen to me when I travel, and posted the story to my LiveJournal mostly as a means to amuse my friends; the tone of voice behind the story is one of weary resignation, not frustration or anger. (Though I’ll note that had I known Bruce would repost it here, I might have been more eloquent and thoughtful.)

Second, as mpd and the anonymous poster above me have noted, this was not a false positive result. The detector correctly detected (and identified) the nitroglycerine residue on my bag, and it functioned exactly as expected. The screening personnel also functioned exactly as expected: They investigated the source of the alarm, asked me reasonable questions to determine why the alarm condition occurred, and, having been satisfied that I did not represent a threat to air safety, allowed me to board my flight. The alarm condition was thus valid (I had nitroglycerine molecules on me), but irrelevant to the overall goal of preserving the safety of the flying public (I’m not a terrorist, so who cares if I have nitroglycerine residue on me?).

Third, keep in mind this was at a Canadian airport. CATSA isn’t a whole lot better than the TSA, but it is marginally less stupid, and the margin seems to make a difference.

The anonymous poster’s comments regarding medical diagnostics are particularly astute and I think the comparisons are very valid: If you spot a suspicious lump on ultrasound, you naturally biopsy it. When the biopsy comes back benign, we don’t turn around and say the ultrasound was a waste of time — we say that the diagnostic process worked more or less as expected.

For a variety of reasons, though, it feels as though there was some kind of failure here, although it’s difficult to figure out exactly where the failure occurred and what should have been done differently. It’s tough to argue that we shouldn’t be checking for explosives, it’s tough to argue that we shouldn’t additionally screen people found to have explosive residues on their personal effects, and it’s tough to say that we shouldn’t document instances where residues were found but posed no threat. It may be that we need to take situations like this in stride and recognize that they will happen, and design the system in such a way that these situations do not escalate into something bigger than they need to be. Viewed in that light, I think The System worked fairly well overall (though I would have preferred that it worked on someone else).

My biggest concern about the whole incident is what happens to the report that was filed as a result of the positive explosives test; not being one to have much faith in the government, I’m not at all convinced that “nothing” is going to happen to the document. Insofar as there are other risks here, I think the biggest one is the personal shock that may come from being suddenly yanked out of line and subjected to a more intensive screening process.

As to some specific comments…

Thomas: “The question is whether or not this system the best we can do for the cost (money/convenience/liberty).” I agree. After having had about a week to think about it, I’ve come to the tough-to-swallow conclusion that it is the best we can do for the relative costs. The whole thing seems excessive but on further reflection, as I said, it’s tough to argue against any one aspect of it. It pains my libertarian soul to say this, but this may be about as good as we’re going to get.

One final risk comes to mind: Because this event was related to airport security, and because we’re used to thinking of airport security as being mostly useless, we run the risk of writing off those procedures which actually do result in a net increase in safety to the traveling public.

I hung my head

If this doesn’t sum up too much of the last five years, I don’t know what else will:

This mindless, authoritarian belief in Presidential Infallibility repeats itself in almost every debate we are having. Those who favor greater protections for accused terrorists for military commissions are labelled by Bush followers as advocating for “terrorist rights” even though the whole point is that we can’t know they are terrorists until we give them a fair trial. But to Bush followers, the Leader’s decision to detain them and accuse them is all we need to know. We can place blind faith in the Leader’s judgment. Thus, to be accused by the Bush administration of terrorism is the same as being a Terrorist. Those detained at Guantanamo, or by the U.S. military, or anyone accused by the President of being an “enemy combatant,” is guilty for that reason alone. And thus anyone who advocates rights for those so accused is, by definition, advocating rights for Terrorists.

The same irrational, zombified mental process dominates the debate over warrantless eavesdropping. According to the administration, it is only eavesdropping on individuals whom it suspects are involved in some way with Terrorists. But to the administration and its followers, to be suspected of terrorism by the administration is to be a Terrorist. Hence, they will say that the Bush administration is only eavesdropping on terrorists because they recognize no distinction between being accused by the administration of terrorism and being a Terrorist. Thus, anyone opposed to warrantless eavesdropping is, to them, opposed to eavesdropping on Terrorists (rather than objecting to the administration’s ability to eavesdrop without first demonstrating that there is reason to believe they are a terrorist).

(On a totally unrelated note, I love Glenn Greenwald and want to have his babies. I think if Glenn Greenwald and Jim Henley started a group blog, they should call it “For Good or For Awesome” because it would either be good, or it would be awesome, or it would be good and awesome, and either way it would kick so much serious ass that it would probably implode upon itself revealing only a pure, dense core of amazing awesome which would probably blast away the outer shell of the blogging universe, which would be ultra-amazing awesome. Ahem.)

Glenn’s right. It is irrational. But can that many people really be crazy? Or is it just that a crazy minority of people have a really loud megaphone? Or is it that a crazy minority of people control all the branches of government in the United States so it doesn’t really mater what the non-crazy majority think? I dunno. But that doesn’t explain why the citizens are so happy to let their government do bad things. So let’s consider the rational reasons:

  1. They genuinely trust the feds. When the government says, “This is a bad person,” they really believe there’s a bad person on the receiving end of the stern look. You have to be very naive to trust the government this completely; you have to not know anyone who has ever been falsely accused of anything, fallen victim to overaggressive cops, or been jacked around by The System. It seems that in order to believe this, your interaction with the government has to be limited to filing a tax return once a year, and it’s imperative that you’re white, middle class, and don’t do anything that attracts undue government attention. Eventually most people grow out of this phase, usually by 25 or so (the first tax audit seems to do it, or the first time you’re asked for ID by a cop for no good reason).
  2. They don’t trust the feds, but they’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this issue. I think most of us inherently suspicious types were in this camp immediately after 9/11, and most of us hopped out once it became painfully apparent (almost as immediately) that the feds were no better at solving this particular problem than they were at solving, say, the drug problem. In order to be in this camp you don’t have to be quite as naive as people in the first camp, but you do need to avoid asking yourself the question, “If the government can’t deliver the fucking mail, what hope in hell do they have of successfully saving my ass from a terrorist attack?”
  3. They’re so scared that they’re willing to pay any price to not be scared. This is the first of the bad camps, exactly the people Franklin warned about in the apocryphal quote everyone’s waving around these days. 9/11 unhinged the yuppies in such a serious way that they lost control of their critical faculties and need to be slapped silly until they settle down. Exhibit A in this instance is James Lileks, who went faaaaar off the deep end after 9/11 even though the odds of his being killed, specifically, are roughly as good as his being crushed by an asteroid. But there are an awful lot of yuppies out there who are shit-scared of this thing, though weirdly they tend to live in places not actually likely to be attacked by terrorists. I note that New Yorkers, as a general rule, are not running to embrace George or his policies, and, lest we forget, they were the ones getting killed on 9/11, not some doofus in Omaha.
  4. They genuinely like dictatorship. This is the scary option. Sara Robinson has written a series of excellent essays about fundamentalist, authoritarian personality types (start here and keep reading; Kung Fu Monkey sums the series up) and though I don’t agree with her completely, there’s a lot to think about in there, and although she’s not speaking specifically to this point I feel it generalizes nicely. There’s always going to be some segment of the population who believe that it’s OK to be brutal and evil to people sufficiently unlike them, and we’re probably not ever going to be able to get away from that. Woe betide those who find themselves on the other side of the fence; it’s exactly like the Christians arguing in favor of the protection of marriage and the establishment of a state religion — what, precisely, makes you think you’re going to be the ones in control for ever?

The problem, unfortunately, is that at the end of the day the delusions — whatever their source — are ultimately self-reinforcing. If there’s no terrorist attack, that proves that whatever Bush is doing works, so we need more of it. If there is another terrorist attack, well, Bush got his hands tied by the Democrats, so we need more of what he was going to do. So either way, we need more. You would think that this bit of logic would tend to nudge people out of one of their delusional camps — two opposite statements lead to the same conclusion? wtf?! — but logic is apparently not most people’s strong suit. If you’re convinced that you’re going to die when Osama sneaks into your bedroom tomorrow night, and that only Bush can save you.. well, there’s a whole host of false premises there and nothing I can do is going to change your mind. We could do ourselves a big favor by lowering the rhetoric over terrorism and stapling James Fallows’ article from the September Atlantic on people’s foreheads, though given the bloodlust in some people with loud megaphones I doubt it would do much good.

Part of me thinks we should just concede defeat on this issue and move on, but then I realize the outcome is going to be so much worse that it probably isn’t worth thinking about. I fear for the United States and I fear for my world. I don’t think George Bush is going to get us all killed (the same way I thought Reagan was going to get us all killed), but I do think he’s doing an excellent job of fucking the shit up and making things about a thousand times worse than they need to be, which is not exactly an original thought but this is my LJ so shut up.

Frink and I have talked about Outer Context Problems, where your frame of reference is so dramatically different that we can’t hope to bridge the gap and have a meaningful conversation. This feels like one of those OCPs — either you believe that we’re all gonna die, or you have your doubts; if you fall into the former camp, nothing someone from the latter camp can do will change your mind. Unfortunately the conditions for leaving the former are very poorly defined indeed, and so I conclude that we’re going to be stuck with this for a long time to come.

And that’s your depressing thought for the morning.

"A very British apocalypse was being prepared for us."

I’ve had this kind of sick fascination with civil defense for quite some time now. What drives this, I think, is my general paranoia and distrust of any kind of “official” government advice when it comes to dealing with things that are manifestly hard to deal with. Given my previously expressed (both professionally and otherwise) stances on emergency preparedness, particularly in this part of the world with regards to earthquakes, this might seem kind of weird, but you have to draw the line somewhere; the line seems to be whether you’re likely to survive the event you’re trying to deal with (nuclear bomb no, earthquake yes) and whether the measures you’re trying to enact would actually be useful (sealing off room to protect from chemical weapon no, stockpiling food and water for a week after an earthquake, yes). Beyond that, fatalism more or less requires me to take the view that we’re all dead, so what difference does it make? “Why prolong it?!”

Still, my fascination with these futile attempts at pacification of the populace remains unchanged. Duck and Cover amuses the hell out of me, and there are a whole host of really good movies from the bad old days that presented this hilariously optimistic view of how to stay alive when the Russians decided to blow the world all to hell. (We’ll ignore, for the moment, the fact that the Americans were vastly more likely to shoot first and the Russians retaliate than the other way around.) Atomic Alert is a great example that most people haven’t seen, and there’s a comment on the site that sorta covers it all:

Reviewer: BWCarver – 5 out of 5 stars – December 10, 2002
Subject: Liars

What strikes me about this video and the others like it (e.g., Duck and Cover) is that they are all made AFTER the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The U.S. government KNEW what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they had the gall to tell people to cover themselves with a coat!?

It’s baffling. If the U.S. had ever been hit by an atomic bomb, people would have learned what a pack of lies they had been told about its likely effects. So, these films express a contradiction. On the one hand the film purports to have the desire of educating people as to the likely effects of an atomic blast, but on the other hand, the film-makers must know that everything they are suggesting is absolutely false and worthless advice.

Recognizing this leads us to look for another motivation for these films. Appeasement? Controlling the fear of a populus with leaders who figure they cannot bear the truth? Something else?

The consensus answer, according to the cynics (hiya!), is that it was probably appeasement. If a majority of people thought they’d survive, they’d be less inclined to support policies that were actually increasing the risk of getting everyone killed. Obviously this didn’t happen, though, and so now we’re left with a collection of material, of varying degrees of creepy, that address many of the more important aspects of emergency preparedness during the Cold War.

One of the creepier public information artifacts was Protect and Survive, the British version of Duck and Cover. And boy, is it ever creepy. It gave people nightmares for a long time and, had I been a kid and seen this stuff, it would have freaked me right out too. We joke about the stupid graphics DHS put together that looked like something out of a particularly stupid aircraft safety card, but the graphics here have no such polish; they’re sparse, to the point, and eerily effective. The film version of Protect and Survive – Action After Warnings is about a thousand times worse; this BBC writeup doesn’t really do it justice — you have to see it for yourself. And then there’s Casualties which, at 1:25, is quite possibly one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen come out of Britain. These were part of a series of 20 films that would have been shown on TV and broadcast over the radio if the UK government ever felt there was a serious risk of an attack — busy work for the people in a crisis, I guess, and the reality is that it probably wouldn’t have worked worth a damn.

(Apparently you can get all 20 films on DVD along with a bunch of other civil defense stuf and part of me really wants to order it. Another part of me, however, thinks that I’ll be up for a month if do.)

But something is better than nothing. And so you got official instructions on how to build a fallout shelter out of books and doors, to help your neighbors in time of war, to listen to the radio, and wait for official instructions. You know, assuming there were official instructions to be issued. It’s roughly the same advice the Americans gave their citizens around the same time and I normally wouldn’t have thought anything of it except that two weeks ago I was in Porthcurno reading a leaflet, “If The Invader Comes,” that the War Office had printed out during WWII encouraging people to stand firm and carry on with their daily lives, even if there were German soldiers traipsing around the countryside and tank battles down the road. And after having been exposed to Protect and Survive in London at the Imperial War Museum, I was primed to notice the similarities between the two plans — both were grim, stiff-upper-lip pieces of work that we would normally associate with British people, and both ultimately downplayed the seriousness of what might happen. Being told to carry on with your normal life would be more or less impossible, whether there was a panzer division in your backyard or a bunch of highly irradiated dust… but that’s what the government wanted British citizens to do. As for what would have happened, that’s anybody’s guess. The UK could be thankful that at least it didn’t have a whole bunch of guns lying around.

It’s easy to picture a scene out of When The Wind Blows where Britons go merrily about preparing for the end of the world and spend most of the time complaining about it. Protect and Survive is frightening to us now because of how effectively it blends optimism and pessimism into one work, but parts of me wonder whether everyone would have seen it that way at the time. Certainly some people did, but is the sequence from When The Wind Blows linked above that hard to imagine? How many people went and built bomb shelters on this continent believing they’d survive? Did they do it with the nagging sense they wouldn’t? Or was there that blind faith in the state that tells us everything’s going to be ok on the theory we won’t be around later to complain it wasn’t? I’m not old enough to remember how those instructions (lies) were received, mostly because I wasn’t alive then.

There’s a scene in Atomic Alert that drives this point home clearly. An attack warning has been issued and the kids go into the fallout shelter in the basement. Boom! Bomb falls on the waterfront, and we cut to a cartoon mushroom cloud blowing up maybe a couple of blocks, and an announcer says that radioactive rain is falling in some places, and that it might be a good idea to avoid radioactive mist. (I’ll get right on that, thanks.) Did people really believe this was how it was going to be?

Ultimately I guess the reason I’m fascinated by this stuff is because it feels like it was part of a huge disinformation campaign by various governments to lie to their citizens about how bad it would really be. Kevin Hall argues, quite persuasively, that Protect and Survive was really about the protection and the survival of the state rather than of the population:

Protect and Survive became a public admission of the change of policy since the abolition of the Civil Defence Corps in 1968. A major change in thinking had taken place and these can be summarised as:

  • Exercises such as Square Leg foresaw a 200mt attack
  • Large scale civil defence efforts were seen as unnecessarily provocative
  • Government policy regarded national survival and survival of the population to be entirely distinct
  • There was little enthusiasm for spending on civil defence
  • Governmental survival was seen as a key priority
  • The Control of internal dissent was seen as a major priority in the run-up to war

That’s.. about par for the course, actually. But there’s more:

Protect and Survive does not state why these preparations were so necessary, particularly in the regard to food. Numerous Home Office Circulars at the time indicated it was government policy not to begin any mass feeding of survivors until at least 14 days had passed since the attack. Officially the reason was that levels of radiation would still be too dangerous. However in civil defence exercises organised by the Home Office one common problem kept repeating itself: during the simulation of the aftermath of nuclear attack not enough people had died. The numbers of survivors meant that the supplies of food available were hopelessly inadequate to feed the population. In fact the best most people could look forward to was a “stew-type meal” per day which provided 800 calories, this would lead to slow starvation of the survivors. …

As far as protection of the public is concerned, the official government line in Protect and Survive was that you would be just as safe in your own home as anywhere else. This has been proven not to be true in any meaningful sense of the word. What Protect and Survive was in fact demonstrating was government was not prepared to maximise the numbers of survivors for a variety of reasons. Firstly was the problem noted above of too many survivors. Second was government policy expressly ruled out a large public bomb shelter plan. Most likely thirdly was looking at the problem of diminishing returns where the implications of saving each life could have been evaluated, possibly leading to the conclusion that small number of survivors press-ganged into forced labour schemes after the attack would have been enough to ensure national survival -— national survival clearly being stated as the Raison d’être of the Protect and Survive policy.

The Protect and Survive policy stood in unique contrast from what was offered in other nations. For example both the USA and USSR had, at the time, a policy of evacuation from major cities. Other nations such as Sweden and Switzerland had regulations which compelled all new homes to have fall-out shelters inside. Britain was put in the position of having neither an evacuation or shelter building programme.

Emphasis his. I encourage you to, as they say, read the whole thing. And it sounds like there’s a book out there I really need to read (Duncan Campbell’s War Plan UK, sadly out of print and now fetching huuuuge $$$ on the used book markets — it’s as bad as Ignition! it’s worse than Ingition!.

Hall’s article digs at the core of the issue: “The U.S. government knew what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they had the gall to tell people to cover themselves with a coat!?” They, the people in charge, couldn’t have believed it it would work — their bunker-building and continuity of government plans (link goes to a BBC story with audio of a creepy nuclear war broadcast from 1970) certainly seem to say so, and Hall and his sources have it pretty meticulously documented — so why would we? And if we didn’t, why’d we keep re-electing the bastards who kept lying to us? Are we as a society capable of deluding ourselves to that degree? Or are we just that gullible?

Either way, the answer depresses the hell out of me. It was a cynical attempt to pacify a populace and convince them to, ahem, “Remain calm! All is well!” There’s some evidence, though, that we didn’t believe it, in the UK at least, and by the time a majority of people stopped believing it was possible to live through something like that (around the time of Reagan and Thatcher) we were well into the 1980s and Cold War paranoia only had a few more years left to run, so ultimately the governments were off the hook. But the lies went on, and I don’t think anyone has ever officially acknowledged how full of shit the civil defense planners were. Then again, when has the government ever acknowledged how full of shit it is?

That depresses the hell out of me, too.

Go big or go home

Let me see if I’ve got this right: The RCMP busts a whole bunch of people who want to plant bombs and blow stuff up, but we’re not really sure what they were going to try to blow up. Fine, I understand why this is significant. So why are we paying all this attention to a guy who wanted to behead the Prime Minister. As in, get close enough to the PM not to blow him up, or shoot him, but to actually cut his head off.

I don’t know why, but I’ve got a weird, nagging feeling that this is, like, the terrorist equivalent of wanting a pony.

Moving target

A. and I were chatting (briefly) today about my upcoming vacation in Europe. “Did you hear about the new terrorist incidents in Turkey?” she said. I had not. She didn’t have any links (bad journalist! no gin for you!), but I’m guessing she was referring to this report of a small explosion, injuring about a dozen people in Mersin, down on the Mediterranian coast near the Syrian border.

Terrorism in That Part Of The WorldTM is nothing new, and some Kurdish groups have a bit of a problem with this kind of behavior, and so it might not exactly be the safest place to be. That said, staying home might be just as dangerous. So who knows?

Aw, fuckit. Ain’t getting any safer.

"This is indefinite dictatorial power. And I don't use that term lightly."

Are you starting to sense a trend?

This isn’t about the spying, although that’s a major issue in itself. This is about the Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search. This is about circumventing a teeny tiny check by the judicial branch, placed there by the legislative branch, placed there 27 years ago — on the last occasion that the executive branch abused its power so broadly.

In defending this secret spying on Americans, Bush said that he relied on his constitutional powers (Article 2) and the joint resolution passed by Congress after 9/11 that led to the war in Iraq. This rationale was spelled out in a memo written by John Yoo, a White House attorney, less than two weeks after the attacks of 9/11. It’s a dense read and a terrifying piece of legal contortionism, but it basically says that the president has unlimited powers to fight terrorism. He can spy on anyone, arrest anyone, and kidnap anyone and ship him to another country … merely on the suspicion that he might be a terrorist. And according to the memo, this power lasts until there is no more terrorism in the world. …

The result is that the president’s wartime powers, with its armies, battles, victories, and congressional declarations, now extend to the rhetorical “War on Terror”: a war with no fronts, no boundaries, no opposing army, and — most ominously — no knowable “victory.” Investigations, arrests, and trials are not tools of war. But according to the Yoo memo, the president can define war however he chooses, and remain “at war” for as long as he chooses.

There’s lots more. As they say, read the whole thing. But it doesn’t matter, because Michael Moore is still fat.

Decoherence

The latest spin, overheard in a couple of different places, is that this domestic spying stuff is just Echelon in drag. And really, if you’re not bitching about Echelon (and really, who is?), there’s no sense in getting upset about the latest from No Such Agency.

Whatever.

If I wanted to find something funny in all of this — if I were even inclined to try finding something funny in all of this — it’s that the opinions and ideas of people who’ve been paying attention to privacy, security, and cryptographic issues for years pale in comparison to those of the shouting heads. Who are you going to listen to on this topic: Guys like Bellovin or Metzger or Gillmore, or some random dude with a blog who misrepresented what’s actually in FISA? Are you more inclined to believe Schneier, or Powerline?

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about all of this; since the blogosphere became more or less instant experts on typography and font design last year, why can’t they become instant experts on this stuff, too?

"… and our nation will fall into despotism. I mean that sincerely."

At the risk of channeling my old blog, Perry Metzger hits it out of the park:

The FISC may be worthless at defending civil liberties, but in its
arrogant disregard for even the fig leaf of the FISC, the
administration has actually crossed the line into a crystal clear
felony. The government could have legally conducted such wiretaps
at any time, but the President chose not to do it legally.

Ours is a government of laws, not of men. That means if the President
disagrees with a law or feels that it is insufficient, he still must
obey it. Ignoring the law is illegal, even for the President. The
President may ask Congress to change the law, but meanwhile he must
follow it.

Our President has chosen to declare himself above the law, a dangerous
precedent that could do great harm to our country. However, without
substantial effort on the part of you, and I mean you, every person
reading this, nothing much is going to happen. The rule of law will
continue to decay in our country. Future Presidents will claim even
greater extralegal authority, and our nation will fall into
despotism. I mean that sincerely. For the sake of yourself, your
children and your children’s children, you cannot allow this to stand.

Of course, you might be tempted to think that Perry is shrill and unbalanced, and that he’s got a bee up his ass about cryptography and privacy, and that really, they had to destroy and ignore the constitution in order to preserve, protect, and defend it. You might be tempted to defend this action as being necessary to prosecute the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on pornography, or anything, really. You might be tempted to say that the innocent have nothing to hide, and if you’re feeling uneasy about being spied on, maybe the government should be looking at you. You might be tempted to brush this off, because the prospect of dying in a terrorist attack scares you more than the thought of the National Security Agency listening to your phone call. Anything goes, right?

Does it? Does it really? How far is “anything”? We’ve got arbitrary detention, officially-sanctioned torture, and spying. We’ve got summary conviction on secret evidence, and surveillance without your knowledge. Hundreds of thousands of names are on lists, but no one knows what the lists or for, or how they got on the list, or whether they’re on one at all. To paraphrase , I think we’re well past the slippery slope and have stumbled into the dark pit at the bottom of the slope. And what amazes me is that there are some people — you know who they are — who are still going to defend Worst President Ever, call it “necessary” and “unfortunate” and “justified,” and call the rest of us objectively pro-terrorist, or soemthing.

Fuck that shit.

Perry’s right: Americans need to wake the fuck up to what’s going on here. They need to grow a pair, stop being afraid because Dick Cheney comes out from time to time to go “booga booga!” in an attempt to scare the nation, start demanding some accountability, and run these assholes out of town on a rail. I’m not sure what I’m more upset about: The fact that this desperately needs to happen, or the fact that it probably won’t happen.

This is a scandal, to be sure, but it’s not an impeachable scandal. It’s not like anyone had sex with an intern here.

Enough is enough

I like cops. I count many many cops among my friends, and I’ve always enjoyed working with them, especially their relatively sick sense of humor. They do a difficult job that I could never in a million years do, and would not want to do (mostly because I can’t stand the people you have to deal with as a cop). For the most part, they’re decent folks who work hard and have a strong, if at times misplaced, sense of loyalty and duty. It’s difficult to fault people like that.

I also like the Taser. It saves lives. I’ve been around enough that I have first-hand knowledge of at least a dozen cases where people got Tasered; without it, these guys would have gotten shot. And it’s a lot more fun to pull prongs out of some yo’s clothes or skin than bullets out of the body (though not being a pathologist, you shouldn’t consider that an authoritative statement). But I have a problem with the Taser, and it goes something like this: Before the Taser came along, cops had two options — “talk” and “kill.” But now there’s a third option — call it “maim” — that isn’t nearly as much work as “talk”ing, and isn’t nearly as awful as “kill”ing, so it gets used more often. This is a hilariously simplistic explanation, and yet I see people who’ve been Tasered for no apparent reason whatsoever. Obviously its use is always a judgment call, and I’m sure no cop goes out planning to Taser anyone, but I’m skeptical of the need for it to be employed as much as it is.

One of the worst moments of my professional life over the past couple of years was watching a drunk belligent guy get Tasered in front of me. It’s really hard to describe — there’s a loud bang, a lot of snapping, and then somebody’s screaming very loudly, and then someone else is yelling. I say it was one of the worst moments because I feel as though I could have prevented it, if I’d been more assertive and more definitive about how I wanted to manage the whole situation. The cops involved were friends, and that makes this an especially troubling event for me. (The guy was fine. He was an asshole, but he was fine.) Was it necessary? At the time, it could be justified. But there’s a nagging sense that if we’d tried to talk him down, worked harder on the communication thing, it might not have gone quite as far.

On the other hand, I distinctly remember a case where a guy had shot at the cops, tried to run one of them over, and then threatened the ERT boys with a big pipe. I’m impressed with, and thankful for, the fact that he was only Tasered and ended up with dog bites to his face, rather than four rounds center mass.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have very mixed feelings about the Taser as a law enforcement tool. Part of me says, “yeah, great”; part of me says, “hey, hold on a second.” It has its uses. It also has its misuses. It’s like any other technology out there, I guess, with the big difference that I have to deal with the aftermath of its use.

Nothing in this story has caused me to change my mind about this device. Nothing at all.