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More WTC News
Posted by
michael
on Thu Sep 13, 2001 08:42 AM
from the staten-island-ferry-now-running dept.
from the staten-island-ferry-now-running dept.
Current WTC happenings: The FBI is searching ISPs with FISA warrants. Architects and civil engineers are starting to speculate on why the towers collapsed. Pictures: NASA, a powerful photoessay, newspaper headlines. Current investigation news: LA Times, NY Times, CNN. They're finally starting to mention casualty figures. Finally, bjb writes: "It isn't the hollywood blockbuster of a story, but I'm a daily reader of Slashdot, and I was on the 38th floor of the WTC 1 building when the first plane hit. Oh, and I was reading Slashdot at the time. You can read about my experience here. It was originally an email that I sent out to friends and family, but I was asked by NPR's Talk of the Nation to make it a web page."
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And here comes Carnivore... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And here comes Carnivore... (Score:4, Funny)
I bet the FBI will suprise people and remove the boxes after they find/don't find what they are looking for.
Re:And here comes Carnivore... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And here comes Carnivore... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm all for civil liberties, but we need to understand that we pay for them with security. The same people who have been claiming that this event will strip us of our civil liberties have also been complaining that the government failed to protect us.
It's understandable that this could happen considering how little access to secure information we want to allow the government to have.
Re:And here comes Carnivore... (Score:5, Insightful)
No amount of inconveniencing will give you the safety you crave.
Repeat after me...
No amount of 'inconveniencing' will give me the safety I crave.
Repeat it over and over as a mantra until you achieve enlightenment.
I could learn martial arts well, with a bunch of buddy's, get onto the plane, kill a few people with some well placed jabs, and take control. Would you be willing to be manacled to prevent this? You can make knives quickly out of many things. Take a stiff plastic or metal box for example. Are you going to make people strip before they get on the plane? I'm sure someone more imaginative than I can come up with scenarios in which even being stripped and manacled would not be enough.
There is no security in the direction you wish to go. As Benjamin Franklin said "Those who would trade liberty for security will get and deserve neither.".
The only way to prevent these attacks is to decrease the motivation to perform them. This is done by being a nicer country, and by being implacably and harshly punitive in our response to such attacks.
I will be traveling by air soon, and I intend to make up some leaflets to distribute at the airport about this. It's either that, or get upset at being patted down and create a scene. I think the leaflet approach to venting my frustrations is much more constructive.
Re:And here comes Carnivore... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure alot of the Japanese Americans who were "inconvenienced" (internment/inconvencience, what's the difference, right RM?) during WWII would see things differently. This is a balancing act for the govt., to be sure, but hyper-reactivity by hawkish proclaimers does not lend itself well to balancing. By seeing and responding to only one angle of this multifaceted issue, those who would bomb now and forget about asking questions later reveal the true nature of their response - anger is always a secondary emotion to fear. Fear is understandable. We all feel it right now. But while it's comforting for some to cover up that primary emotion with tough talk, it's also dangerous to those who might listen, and to the nation as a whole.
Re:And here comes Carnivore... (Score:4, Insightful)
Get real...
Take your logic a step further - Congress needs to immediately pass legislation banning the hijacking of airplanes, and further banning the crashing of airplanes into buildings. Because if those specific laws were in existance, this tragedy could have been prevented. Yeah, that's the ticket...
Ban anything remotely resembling a weapon from going on an airplane. You still have two large problems:
1) the almost complete inability to detect these "banned" weapons given today's lax airport security and low-skilled minimum-wage "security" guards
2) the ability to kill without a "banned" weapon - a pen can easily be used to kill someone, bare hands, fingernails, whatever extreme you wish to take the example. The "prison" examples as frequently sited - prison bans all weapons, prisoners still manage to kill each other despite the bans.
The basic message of Omnifarious' posting is correct. Your statement is similar to another former slashdot arguement, that Columbine supposedly could have been prevented by tougher laws on carrying guns into a school. Right...
The people who put this attack into motion did not care about airline regulations, or laws of any kind. This was an act of terror, an act of war. Tougher rules at airports without increased levels of inforcement and inspection will accomplish NOTHING. The only response the people who committed this act were/are possibly considering is military response.
We have two options: respond militarily, or respond socially (change our public and political policies). I personally favor both - a swift (and devastating) military response (once a proper target is identified) and an attempt to shift our public and political policies in regards to terrorism, terrorist states, and etc.
Certainly, we can and should increase airport security. My base argument here is that flying (like driving) is a privledge and not a right. If I understand that I have to be knocked unconscious in order to fly on a public commercial airline, then I either choose to fly (and be drugged) or not. Likewise, more reasonable talks of banning all sorts of weapons on airplanes does not infringe upon my rights, only upon a privledge. Whether or not I feel it is intelligent to start taking weapons out of the hands of innocent people over this is a whole different matter (argument: ~20 civilians with large knifes on each plane would have almost certainly been able to prevent this sort of hijacking, had they tried to do so).
Re:And here comes Carnivore... (Score:4, Informative)
No-one except Tom Clancy, that is.
Loss of privacy is not necessarily loss of liberty (Score:5, Insightful)
Call it my contrarian nature, but amidst all the usual self-centered-libertarian-police-state-paranoia, I feel compelled to point out that loss of privacy is not necessarily loss of liberty. Nowhere is it guaranteed even in the US constitution; never has it been established that privacy actually produces a freer society; and in practice the idea that you can actually have privacy is a total myth. David Brin makes a good case in his for all of this and more in his controversial The Transparent Society [amazon.com] (chapter one available here [kithrup.com]). His core arguement is for complete transparency - that all citizens should be allowed to observe the activities of individuals, government, and business - rather than the alternative of those having the power to do so using surveillance to their private advantage. While you'll almost certainly have objections, it's well worth consideration, and it's always worth it to look at things from an alternative perspective.
Coordinated Efforts (Score:4, Funny)
Just a thought---
space imaging nyc image 09/12/2001 (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.spaceimaging.com/newsroom/attack_galler y.htm [spaceimaging.com]
Re:It's been said before... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure it is. Events like this open up the potential for society to give up liberties for perceived safety which probably isn't all that real. I for one worry about the future of our liberties in teh name of 'preventing another WTC'
I submit that these bastards could STILL get the weapons on board even with all the changes. No curb side checkin? LIke thats gonna make a DIFFERENCE? Its SO simple to make a weapon - just as a prisoner. Consider this:
Shaving kit - inside, one normal razor that uses a double edged blade. Blade installed, no spares. Elsewhere in your bag, a plastic or wooden handle of some kind with slot for blade, by itself or with other stuff that looks innocent. Maybe a little super glue. GO to a stall in a terminal bathroom. Take blade, insert in handle, glue in place. Slit someones throat when necessary and take over whatever vessel you're on. Think about it - you can probably come up with plenty on your own. Thats just one way and there are plenty others. These guys planned this for MONTHs as the reports of flight training indicate. You wouldn't even NEED to bring weapons with you - maybe one of your pals works IN THE TERMINAL past the checkpoints and cna give you a weapon of some kind. Banning plastic knives? OK - thats gonna help!
Face it folks - no matter WHAT happens, the only thing that could prevent something like this is sky marshals on EVERY flight in civilian clothes. And even then, they may not be able to overpower 5 guys with weapons (since shooting guns in the air is er, not a great idea)
So in short, I think our forefathers wisdom IS applicable and helpful to remind folks that we may be fooled into giving up liberties for supposed security that doesn't really exist
Re:It's been said before... (Score:4, Insightful)
Could an airliner's skin be sufficiently toughened for Air Marshals to be able to use rubber bullets?
If not, tasers, those new infra-red stun devices the military are playing with - even a harpoon gun could be very effective against skyjackers.
A third option, that nobody seems to have mentioned - the pilots already have a "panic button" in the event of a skyjacking. This could easily also put the plane irreversibly on automatic pilot, or remote piloting, to ensure that the vehicle -could- not be used in this way, and WOULD land safely at the nearest suitable emergency runway.
There is a term, used in connection with hostile acts, and the response given. That term is "Dane Gold". It is said that in the times of King Ethelred the Unready, whenever the Danes landed a raiding fleet, King Ethelred would rather just pay them to go away. After a while, the Danes cottoned on to the fact that simply landing on a beach was an easy way to make money. And they made a lot of it.
Thus, today, when someone provides a means for a hostile force to repeatedly profit off exactly the same strategy, they are said to be paying "Dane Gold".
Provided it is even remotely possible for any terrorist organisation to use civilian aircraft as weapons against America, then America is vulnerable to paying that Dane Gold.
Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan adopted the philosophy of "the only ones paying are the other side". Often, this involved storming aircraft, with guns blazing. I, personally, have intense dislike for their hard-line attitudes. However, I'm not even going to question the fact that the legacy of their strategy was a massive reduction in such actions, in the air and at sea.
The only alternative I can see to their hardline tactics would be Air Marshals on every flight with enough disabling force to cripple any attempt, and some kind of "panic button" the pilot can use as a "last resort" to disable the controls beyond any person's ability to restore, in-flight.
Islamic fundamentalism (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting reading:
- Terror in the Mind of God: the Global Rise of Religious Violence [dannyreviews.com]
- Political Islam [dannyreviews.com]
Meanwhile, in Australia they are already stoning school buses with Islamic kids on them [smh.com.au]... (I have a rant about this on my home page [danny.oz.au].)Danny [danny.oz.au]
[I have written 600 book reviews [dannyreviews.com]]