Oh, but some have. They've thought of the fact that the Earth is a massively complex system, and that it would be incredibly arrogant of some apes on it to assume they have it all figured out after observing only the tiniest fraction of their own existence, let alone the Earth as a whole.

And yet when a family has firearms, they are unstable whacko nutjob conspiracy theorists...

Are you actually suggesting that scientists always think of everything? NASA's history over the last 2 decades alone can disprove that theory.

You're essentially suggesting that /. is here so that nerds can come here to get group validation. Or are they allowed to disagree on occasion?

And all the arrogant bastards with beachfront property will pressure the legislators they've bought for tax breaks and government programs that will fund never-ending projects that truck in dirt and "shore up" the coasts at the costs of trillions so they can keep having their dinner parties while watching the sunsets over the bay.

Yeah, China has a pretty solid track record of honesty when it comes to well... everything.

/sarcasm

Oh, and I just thought of this: Harry Reid (the US Senate Majority Leader) just explained that the open enrollement period for the Affordable Care Act will be extended thru mid-April, and explicitely stated that a part of the reason for this was for those people less familiiar with this new fangled internet thing who just dont have the skills to hop on and sign up for Obamacare. So apparently there are potentially millions of suspicious characters out there. They are probably dangerous because of their level of anger on not having health insurance?

Yes, bullshit.

Neither that article nor the .pdf download from DHS/DOJ mentions a single website, let alone any social media site, the words social or media, or anything to do with web addresses at all. As close as either gets is to suggest it could be suspicious if a traveler makes efforts to avoid hotel wifi in favor of going to a more anonymous internet café.

If you're referring to the items "leaked" a few weeks ago, that was not something produced by any government agency. It was something that the founders of Google mentioned in their book, which they were doing a press tour for recently. They say that in the future, everything will be so wired into the global networks that a person "off the grid" will be suspicious. That's a pretty huge leap to suggesting that DHS thinks anyone not on facebook is suspicious.

According to Static Brain (http://www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/) there were only about 100 million users on facebook as of March 2013. That's not even 1/3 of the US population, and they also state that 75% of those users are outside of the US. So according to you the vast majority of the US falls into your "terrorist" watchlist.

http://www.informationweek.com...? Among other things listed in the article:

Also in the article is a link to the policy as released in 2010.

Questions?

Do you work for the IRS?

It's kept Obama in office.

Wrong. The real issue here is why the state thinks they have a right to silence a personal opinion.

Also wrong. Setting aside copyright law that contradicts your statement, it's still irrelevent. Unless you'd like to suggest that if you have a newspaper article published (that doesnt call for violence or breaking the law and isnt a lie), it's ok for the state to demand that the article be retracted. Are you suggesting that the First Ammendment is a farse? Here's the text of it, in case you're unfamiliar:

Again, this really doesnt have anything to do with it being private. It has to do with whether the state has a right to determine what a private citizen can or cannot say, and where they can say it. And THEN going so far as using those statements, private or public, as cause to dig into inherently private email conversations; email being a private communication upheld by local, state and federal courts across the country as something that requires a warrant to open (unless you're the NSA). And threatening a minor child in order to coherce access without the parents consent is flatly illegal.

Actually the big picture here is why any mandatory state-run program thinks they have the right to silence dissent. The anti-constitutional means are only evidence of the Orwellian ends.

This entire scenario is no less frightening than if you were told by a sherrif that you must provide your Facebook password so that they could investigate the fact that you used the site to bitch about the DMV. Or posted that you disliked the voting record of your Congressmen. Or that you thought that the Presidential foreign policy was a joke.

Bullshit.

The Federal Governmnet actually has rules that state that IF you use Facebook you have to be very concious and careful about in what tone you post to it.

Evil, disturbed, misunderstood, misguided, uneducated, uncultured, ... Call it whatever word you like. The point is there are people out there who are not only willing to harm you or me, they revel in the possibility of it. Like I said, I'll give them every benefit of the doubt and suggest that maybe they are just mentally unbalanced, or have a real psychological disorder. But whatever the diagnosis they are no less a danger.

And for the same reason it would be highly irresponsible to suggest that a young woman walk down dark unfamiliar urban streets in the middle of the night without mace as the minimum of defense, it would also be highly irresponsible to stand down all military force and ask the psychopath with the nuclear weapons to pretty please stay inside his national borders.

Look, I applaud your faith in humans as a whole. But you're an idiot if you think every human is or can be a selfless, loving sweetheart. Millions of years of evolution dictates that there must be some level of survival instinct. I have very few limits when that is applied to my family, for instance. Anyone tries to harm them, and I will do whatever is in my power to prevent it. And I don't think there's anything in the world wrong with that.