'Surely trying to ensure that your children have the best, or a good enough, opportunity for a great life is responsible parenting?' Yeah, certainly - wouldn't we all be happier if we'd always behaved exactly the way our parents thought we should?

It seems to me that most of the people I know who are really happy with their lives went through a very dark period at some point - in many cases, that dark period helped them learn how to make friends with their demons and become stronger and more whole individuals as a result. They didn't get there by surgically removing the parts of themselves they didn't like.

This isn't about the child's happiness - it's about the parents'. It's about saving parents who have never dealt with their own issues from having to face those same issues in their children ("gee, Doc, I don't know how our child has so many alcoholic/violent/psychopathic genes in there, but we for damned sure didn't have anything to do with it"). Responsible parenting, indeed.

Yes, it was Anonymous that hit the CIA, because the person who did it used Anonymous to conceal his identity. And for the exact same reason, it was also *not* Anonymous - it was just somebody using the name.

Anonymous isn't really a group - it's a label. Among other things, it's a tool for hackers to publish their accomplishments without risking additional exposure. In an idealized sense, it's very powerful protection of our second amendment rights, if we take hacking and privacy to be the arms of the information age.

What was the source of this story? Who reported it?

Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine in college was arrested by the TSA and interrogated for taking photos of airplanes taking off from the local airport. Despite being able to provide every form of ID known to man, as well as the contact information for his teacher who knew he was doing the project, they continually claimed that they had checked out his story and found him to be a liar. They held him for four hours before releasing him. I thought, as he told me this, that there must have been some mistake, until his teacher confirmed that he had never been contacted about it.

Okay, so that's the TSA, they're idiots, fine. But that story didn't make headlines, and that was much closer to 9/11, when the fear was more substantial. This one did make headlines, and it doesn't paint the authorities in a good light. Normally, terror suspect articles make world headlines and are packed with the evidence against the suspects, something to make it at least look like they found a real terrorist for once, something to reinforce the protector-hero image.

This story, on the other hand, paints the police as tyrants, for which authorities around the world will be increasingly despised and feared. Very few will read this article and feel more safe, and many will be afraid to decry it too publicly for fear that they might be next. Taken as it's written, therefore, the effect of this article is to create tyranny by way of perception, even though the event itself is not extraordinary.

So the question is - how did it get to us? The event happened, fine, but how did it get to the news room floor, and what transformation did it undergo in becoming this article? Who wants us to be scared? The only people I can think of are tyrants, and people who are very afraid of tyrants. Which one is acting in this case?