� Misc. happenings. | Main | Not much new �
April 16, 2003
You want privacy, you got it.
Homeland Security Dept. Fills Privacy Post (TechNews.com)
According to the WaPo, Nuala O'Connor will report directly to Tom Ridge. She's from DoubleClick who is well known for lawsuits against it for violations of privacy. What is interesting is that her job will be the Privacy Czar in the Dept. of Homeland Security. She was brought onboard DoubleClick to clean up some of the mess there.
I had a discussion with a coworker about a week after September 11th about our freedom. My thought was that if things got much worse around here, people would trade their freedom card for a safety card. His simple response was, "No, nobody would do that." To make people safe, it seems that you have to know what's going on. In the age of the Cold War, we used spies, satellites, U-2 spy planes, etc to find out what our enemies were doing. Now in our so-called "melting-pot", we have supposed enemies who are our next-door neighbors. The Oklahoma federal bombings were blatant proof that anyone including an American citizen could be a terrorist. The "war on terror" involves "preventing acts of terror" and to do that, authorities need to find out what's going on.
My simple point is that this means compromising some of our liberties and freedoms. I personally don't think we should but it seems inevitable. We have people in the White House who dictate our foreign policy (which seems to be a huge subect of debate) trying to protect us. However the policies they have almost fuel the fire which only give fundamentalist whackos more support from the Arab nations.
Posted by beamz at April 16, 2003 4:28 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.twentybelow.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/148