And they're going to find the forensic analysts to dig though all these hundreds to thousands of terabytes of pure shite exactly WHERE??
4 year old children.
In a candy store.
Without adult supervision.
As per usual.
Jesse, I seriously doubt that we're ever going to see constitutional government again this side of one or more civil wars.
But it would really make a major serious fucking difference if the government were run by ADULTS.
I concluded I wasn't going to stay in the US the last time my Visa was up for renewal and the hoops required to jump through had turned even more ridiculous than the previous time.
But if bullsh*t like this keeps up, I don't even want to _visit_ the US, let alone work there. Can't bring a laptop, can't bring a digital camera - if I bring a film camera, will they seize the film? - hell, I'm probably safer not bringing a mobile phone either as they'd seize that to see who I was calling and whether my ringtone is subversive or not.
Considering the US economy is already on life support, destroying your entire tourism industry in one fell swoop is really the sensible move...
The judge said five to ten
but I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown...
You start wearing the blue and brown
You're working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
You made your first kill now
Email (encrypted) everything back home; when you go through Customs have one throwaway flash drive on your person, containing a full 128Mb of text.
Just an endless repetition of the 4th Amendment, verbatim.
"And they're going to find the forensic analysts to dig though all these hundreds to thousands of terabytes of pure shite exactly WHERE??"
They're not, of course. 5 years after 9/11, and the FBI still had less than 10 fluent Arabic-speaking analysts on its staff of 12000. And even top agents and officials couldn't make the distinction between Sunni and Shiite when asked. That's how much the Bush administration really cares about security from Islamic terrorism.
But for the authoritarian adults in the administration (and some of them are adults), mass data mining and automated analysis and security from the "Four Horsemen" isn't really the object of this excercise. They leave those magical dreams to dimwits and incompetents like Bush. The real objects are:
1. General intimidation: getting citizens used to the idea that the government can circumvent the 4th and other Amendments on a regular basis. Government agents and agencies will find themselves with a lot of nice electronic toys for personal use or for auction sale to fund the agency. But the vast majority of the data collected from those toys will end up like old Gold Key comic books in an obsessive-compulsive collector's basement, never examined or catalogued, unless one of the next two goals are applicable...
2. Stifling political dissent: The property of some "suspect" people (like freelance reporters who vacation in Europe) WILL be targetted for real, if superficial and lazy, analysis. Data mining and running decryption mills are costly even applied to "persons of interest" (reporters, attorneys, outspoken liberals, people with Arab names, etc). But their unencrypted contact and e-mail databases, their passwords and account info, their writing and diaries, and their embarrassing porn and correspondence are low-hanging fruit that can be cheaply copied, tagged, stored, integrated into social network analysis databases, and put to easy use should the occasion arise.
3. Personal gain: The people who run the authoritarian show are also crony capitalists par excellence. And if your or your clients' business is of interest to their cronies, don't be surprised if you find yourself singled out for a "random" search and confiscation similar to item 2, with a special (though unspoken) focus on deal memos, product or service specs, rate sheets, client and customer lists, decision-support databases, and general e-mail and spreadsheets.
(another trend related to Item 3 is the idea of using Customs agents as copyright enforcers, confiscating MP3s and homemade DVDs and reporting violators to the entertainment industry for civil action. Your tax dollars at work.)
So yes, there are plenty of idiot children in the Bush administration, including its figurehead. But the competent adults take the three items above very seriously, and will do their best to min-max the mechanisms of the border police (and eventually domestic police) to effect their goals.
I've known this for a while now. I don't travel with a laptop, keep sensitive information on encrypted flash drives, and keep sensitive information OFF my smartphone (except for contacts, all the PDA's data is on removable SD cards anyway). I doubt I have anything they really want, but I'll be damned if I'm going to hand over anything more than a cheap thumb drive filled with encrypted data or a cheap SD card filled with innocuous personal stuff to uniformed thugs. I'll be polite and helpful and give them a smile doing this. But if they want the phone or the encryption keys, they can talk to my attorney.
"I seriously doubt that we're ever going to see constitutional government again this side of one or more civil wars."
Yep, the best we can hope for at this point is someone like Obama, who'll serve a mild moderating influence as opposed to "pull them control rods all the way out!" nutcases like Bush or McSame. But the neoconservatives have stocked the permanent bureaucracy and part of the judiciary with political loyalists, so he'll only be able to do so much.
The gates continue to slowly and relentlessly swing shut, and they'll never be as open as they once were. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to push them back in the other direction, or looking for ways around them as long as we can.
Please, would anyone here around be kind enough to explain why China is so bad, awful and wrong, when the US administration basically tries the same kind of totalitarian crap?
China is a Communist government and brutally suppresses its people (who work long hours at low wages for the benefit of the rich), taking their goods without law anytime they feel like it for the benefit of the Leaders of the State, and locking up people the State dislikes without benefit of counsel or trial.
This is America. We have rights, which means we can protest in blogs if that should ever happen here.
Whatsamatta... Don't you love America?
LOL.
Not a "Communist government", Jesse. Everything else is spot-on, but China hasn't been "Communist" since considerably before Mao died.
James Pierpont Morgan is no doubt burning with envy, even hotter than the anthracite he's roasting over, just contemplating the modern PRC.
Ol' Jes':
Nothing new here atall. Since 1789, the Customs Service worked under the premise that the Constitution did not begin until you passed through the border checkpoints and actually entered the US. This has been the law of the land since the beginning, so we need not weep over some newly discovered 4th Amendment "violation" here. Believe me, I know this from working for the Agency for some 25 years, and I had to know every law, court case, policy order, etc., throughout its 200+ year history to survive in an organization which was often led by cretins.
a little dishonesty on your part here jesse, you make it sound like the 4 amendment applies at teh border...the border ahs allways been a constitutional grey area, your rights may not apply there.
yes thsi is stupid, yes this is worng..but its not a signe of the further erosion of our rights...you can't erode what you never had.
Legal, sure. Offputting (or a footbullet), definitely. Win the War on Terrorism but lose the War for Tourism.
You dont have 4th Amendment protections at the border. As simple as that, those rights do not exist when you are entering or exiting the country.
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