Considerettes

The Village Voice has an article by Noah Shachtman describing a system called “Combat Zones that See” or CTS. It’s a surveillance system using off-the-shelf parts that would be used for urban warfare and the like, but the folks bidding on creating it (and it ain’t that far off) say that there’s definite homeland security applications, and in fact that may be the intended ultimate use of it.

As currently configured, the old-line cameras speckled throughout every major city aren’t that much of a privacy concern. Yes, there are lenses everywhere-several thousand just in Manhattan. But they see so much, it’s almost impossible for snoops to sift through all the footage and find what’s important.

CTS would coordinate the cameras, gathering their views in a single information storehouse. The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to “track everything that moves.”

“This gives the U.S. government capabilities Big Brother only pretended to have,” said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank. “Before, we said Big Brother’s watching. But he really wasn’t, because there was too much to watch.”

Is this supposed to make me feel more secure in my own country? We’re continuing to see the truth to the statement that those who give up a little liberty for a little security will wind up with neither.

Oh, now this is rich! A story about two guys starting their own “Government Information Awareness” web site.

Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system [TotalTerrorist Information Awareness], two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials.

The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials — reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy.

And here’s an interesting feature:

The site also takes advantage of round-the-clock political coverage provided by cable TV’s C-Span networks. McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi use video cameras to capture images of people appearing on C-Span, which generally includes the names of people shown on screen. A computer program “reads” each name, and links it to any information about that person stored in the database. By clicking on the picture, a GIA user instantly gets a complete rundown on all available data about that person.

The GIA site constantly displays snapshots of the people appearing on C-Span at that moment. If there’s a dossier on a particular person, clicking on the picture brings it up. A C-Span viewer watching a live government hearing could learn which companies have contributed to a member of Congress’s reelection campaign, before the politician had even finished speaking.

More power to ’em.

Democrat presidential hopeful Howard Dean says we should intervene in Liberia to head off a human rights crisis. How does this square with his opposition to the Iraq war?

“The situation in Liberia is exactly the opposite,” Dean said. “There is an imminent threat of serious human catastrophe and the world community is asking the United States to exercise its leadership.”

An “imminent threat”, which is “exactly the opposite” of an actual threat that had existed in Iraq for decades? Well gee, good thing Liberian President Charles Taylor hasn’t already started gassing his own people. Then the Democrats would consider him untouchable.

Back in my BBS days (“Bulletin Board Systems”, for the uninitiated, where you’d dial in to another computer and have discussion groups and could download files) I’d had discussions with folks about marijuana legalization, and why I thought that it was simply the first step to legalizing stronger drugs. Those who were for legalization always insisted that it would all stop with marijuana and go no further (to heroin, crack, etc.), ignoring centuries of human behavior that showed that when one barrier was removed, it never stopped there.

One of their reasons for placing marijuana in a separate class of drugs was that it wasn’t nearly as bad for you as the harder drugs. “There has never been a case of a marijuana-induced crime spree” was how one fellow put it. Perhaps not, but how about inducing schizophrenia?

Speaking at the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ annual conference in Edinburgh, [Professor Robin Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry in London] said: “In the last 18 months a number of studies have confirmed that cannabis consumption acts to increase later risk of schizophrenia. This research must not be ignored.”

Cannabis users were found to be 6 to 7 times more likely to develop psychotic symptoms or schizophrenia within 3-15 years following heavy use.

Professor Murray said these findings had been largely ignored.

Well of course. That would simply delay legalization.

Ralph Peters (retired Army officer) had a great editorial in the NY Post yesterday dealing with sensationalism winning the day on reports coming out of Iraq.

Our troops are doing remarkably well – but the headlines make it sound like a disaster. Last weekend, almost as many Americans died in a residential balcony collapse in Chicago as have been killed by hostile fire in “postwar” Iraq.

As a former soldier, I don’t discount any American casualties as unimportant. But the fact is that, despite real errors and miscues, reconstruction efforts in Iraq are going surprisingly well.

How bad is it in Iraq? It’s terrible – if you’re a former Saddam loyalist, ex-secret policeman or Ba’ath Party muckety-muck on the wrong end of Operation Sidewinder. The party’s over for Baghdad’s bully-boys, and they don’t much like it.

For perspective…

On our worst day last week, when two convoys came under attack, more than 600 other U.S. convoys didn’t hear a single shot. Two patrols got into firefights. The other 500 patrols didn’t even get hit with a water balloon.

Of course the same folks who predicted massive military and civilian casualties are the same folks predicting we’ll lose the peace. The same ones who didn’t blink at the long periods of time we took for nation-building in Somalia and Haiti are carping already at the short time we’ve been working on rebuilding what we had to break in Iraq getting rid of Saddam. You don’t suppose that it’s all a matter of who’s sitting in the Oval Office, do ya’?

[Note: This is a post from June 13th, but I accidentally posted it to my other blog, “Considerable Quotes”. When I went to post a new quote today, I saw this sitting in there. Blame my not keeping track of what blog the “w.bloggar” software was pointing to.]

James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” has a great “turnabout is fair play” item. After enumerating some of the things that anti-war folks predicted that turned out to be false or overblown, he includes this:

Some war foes even said–get this!–that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and would use them on American troops. Well pardon us for asking, but if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, where are they?

It’s possible that this was all just a massive failure of intelligence, but we can’t help suspecting that war opponents knew better and deliberately misled the public in an effort to establish a pretext for keeping a mass-murdering dictator in power. In either case, they now face a yawning credibility gap. The American people deserve nothing less than a full congressional investigation into the false claims of antiwar politicians, scholars, journalists and activists. If they lied to us about Iraq, how can we ever trust them to talk us out of future wars?

Typical of Taranto’s sense of humor, this is both funny and pointed. You can add to the list of those who said Saddam had WMDs all the prewar doomsayers. There were plenty of them predicting massive US casualties because of that assumption. Where are they now?

Talk of tax cuts, and the benefits of them:

• “We want a signal of revival to go out from this weekend to the people in our country.”
• “This government is improving the framework for more growth….”
• “It’s the signal that we want to send to consumers and business.”

A Bush administration official? Nope, Gerhard Schroeder! Even liberals in Germany are conceding the benefits to the economy from tax cuts. Some liberals, though, are chanting the same thing in German as Democrats do here, “How will we pay for them?” Schroeder’s answer is the obvious solution; spending cuts and more capitalism (selling shares of ex-state monopolies). Conservatives in Germany are wanting better ways of reducing that spending that Schroeder, to be sure, but it’s good to see that some “mindshare” is being won by conservatives over there.

Now it’s time for our American liberals to get the wake-up call.

Scrappleface has a devastatingly funny and on-target spoof of last week’s Supreme Court sodomy ruling. If states are not allowed to invade a person’s “privacy” by judging on the morality of what happens in their home, how about overturning the smoking of crack in the home? And I’d add; does this derail the efforts of those seeking to ban smoking in the home?

As Rush Limbaugh put it, the Supreme Court has now placed itself in the position of a super-sized city council. Remember during the 2000 election the hue and cry of the Democrats about subverting the “will of the people”? Well, how about the will of the people of Texas as expressed in their duly elected legislature?

The Supreme Court should be deciding issues of Constitutionality. The sodomy case was instead decided on changing social norms and the same extra-constitiutional “right to privacy” that Roe v Wade was based on. If it’s not in the Constitution, the states may take it up, and it’s up to the people of that state to decide how they want to govern, not the Supremes.

(And no, this does not negate the idea that the Supremes had jurisdiction in the 2000 election. The national election is a national election, and thus has federal laws that govern it. Part of that is ensuring that states follow federal rules on how they are to be conducted, although it helps if the states will start by following their own rules.)

CNN is reporting that Iraqi scientists had the equipment for continuing their nuclear weapons program hidden in backyard gardens. All they were waiting for was for liberals (like Harold Pinter) to win the day and have sanctions lifted. Just another reason to not take their policy advice.