Funny. I don't feel any safer than I did before 20010911.
Why not? The airplane pilots' doors are now locked. Now most people can no longer commandeer a missile and fly it into a large building at their whim. That is the most dramatic improvement in security that has happened in response to 9/11. The rest is show business designed make it easier to find statistically improbable patterns of behavior in order to identify flanking threats (rather than the face-frontal attack threats that they purport to thwart).
There has not been a tradeoff between liberty and security in our response to terrorism in this country and in our efforts to offer security to the people of the United States
is an attempt to take advantage of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
and the reason it will succeed is that those who are smart enough to know better than to make logic errors in public don't make them in error. They make them because they are selling something. And if they are selling it in the open, their sales pitch is just the tip of the iceberg.
I am very confident coders can play much better than lawyers.
Then why are the lawyers winning?
Provided enough laws, everyone's a criminal.
Only under common law system. Without it, you'd always run the gambit of a jury not buying your argument that an esoteric point of law is enough to send someone away for 20 years. With it, the jury only gets asked cryptic questions about what they heard. These questioned are designed to conform to the standards which are carved out by the specialists in the law who know the nuances of the web of implications of all previous judicial opinions. If you think jury nullification is possible under such regiment, you watch too much TV.
But there is no denial, there is the world Before Snowden and After Snowden.
Yes, there is. Hundreds of thousands of people without any kind of security clearance knew about the building in SLC and what it does. It's not even below ground. It's huge.... humangous even. The news of what it does would have been common place by now with or without Snowden.
what if Snowden never happened?
We would know exactly everything that we already know, but we wouldn't think of some guy, whose name sounds like a title of a fiction novel, when we thought about it. The building in SLC is HUGE. You can see it from space. There is no way the government had any intention of hiding it. If it did, it wouldn't be above ground. Snowden's job is to be a distraction from the topic.
No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.