(no subject)

[lsanderson]

Article on native plants (well, to the east coast) in today's NY Times.

Today's blare of headlines about the FBI, and Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Bush's willingness to forgo mere civil liberties is rather scary. Having lived through the McCarthy period when FBI agents would drive into the wilds of North Dakota to question farm families about their political leanings, regularly tap phone lines, infiltrate any organization that was against the Vietnam war and blackmail senators and presidents to ensure funding and a strict hands-off policy, I think we're moving back rules that were put in place for very good reason. Thinking that "They won't do it again" belies a firm belief in magic.

We are entering a dark and scary time, not because of foreign demons, but because of the domestic ones we are letting loose amongst ourselves.

Comments

[mizzlaurajean.livejournal.com]

Watched The News Hour with Jim Lheaher(sp) on PBS about it. I can see where there is room for improvement with the FBI, which is not to say that I agree with their chosen methods. What I agree with is that they need to be able to intervine in a way as to prevent such things from happening, to whatever extent possible without breeching our rights. Granted the trade off is that they won't always be able to prevent tragedy's.
I don't think that it will reach the level of invasion into our private lives to that degree or in that manner.
The most unfortunate aspect, side effect is that it makes people more tolerant of privacy invasions and discrimnation. I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. On the other hand it's like anything government everbody's overworked and can't keep up with their work loads. If they could even keep up with the info they had recieved maybe they would be able to better discrimate the real threats from the phony's. Or maybe they just all need to take communication classess.

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

Having lived through much of the same stuff that Larry has, I'm going to have to agree with his take on the situation.
It's not clear to me that the erosion in our rights will result in any more security. I feel that the opposite is a rather more likely result.
We can already see what benefit ignoring constitutional guarantees has had - some hundreds of people were arrested after 9/11 and been denied due process. As far as I, or anyone else knows, not one of these people have been connected with any terrorism.
Indeed, it is altogether too reminiscent of the last time we had such a shock - we got American concentration camps out of that shabby episode.

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I think it was Bruce who said that they had too much information, and that much of their problem is determining what is valuable and what is chaff. They had most of the clues a reasonable person would need to determine something was up. They lacked the ability to filter out the wheat from the chaff, or else an amazing unwillingness to do so. Rather than attempt to deal with the real issues, the first thing the government started saying is that we need more information (lots more chaff and a bit of wheat). One "good" thing about it, they're giving up a bit on their "war" on drugs. No one apparently has commented on this.

Ashcroft saying they won't do the same thing they did in the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s gives me no comfort at all. If we can view civil liberties as chickens, we've put a fox in charge of the henhouse.