Today we have more updates on items covered here before. Eminent domain backfires, the Patriot Act not being used to stop terrorism, and the hazards of national security letters.
Those “sneak and peek” searches in the USA PATRIOT Act, where the government can conduct a search without telling you about it until later — sometimes much later — aren’t being used for terrorist investigations. In fact, they aren’t being used much at all, according to a New York Sun investigation.
Responding to the news of the FBI using national security letters to spy on innocent Americans, security expert Bruce Schneier has a must-read essay on why surveillance of innocent people is such a bad thing for our society. “This isn’t about our ability to combat terrorism; it’s about police power. . . . unfettered police power quickly resembles a police state, and checks on that power make us all safer,” he writes. And one victim of national security letters tells his story.
The world-wide adoption of a decentralized network that connects everything creates continuous technical, social and policy challenges that no one could have foreseen in 1969. Even as we take the Net for granted, the way we do the air that we breathe, decisions are being made by policy-makers, technologists and end-users that shape its future.
Instead of the left agreeing to cut social spending and the right agreeing to cut military spending, the right agrees to more welfare and the left agrees to more warfare. How long will it be before foreigners stop buying our debt, and hyperinflation arrives?