Why is anyone shocked - isn’t Bush the poster boy for terrorist recruitment.
Afterall, didn’t his Daddy and Cheney arm terrorists like Saddam & Osama and refuse to help the people of Iraq when they rose up agaimst Saddam?

We the people better make our move quickly now, because, as the author of comment 11733 points out, our counterterrorism “experts” are about to take the Internet away from us.  Why are they doing this?  Because they realize that the Internet has the potential to change the world.  All it will take is for us to deliver the right message at the right time to everyone on line and, presto, anything could happen.  Ordinarily they’d have shut us out at the beginning, as they did with radio and TV, but the Internet emerged so rapidly that it got away from them.  They’re not about to let this situation continue and risk a confrontation with a hundred million or more Americans clamoring for power.  Hold on, though.  We still have a small window of opportunity..  What’ll the message be?

The debate around increasing government capacity for homeland surveillance is picking up steam in Canada too.

As far as I’m concerned the biggest root cause of global terrorism are the past and present machinations of power and wealth, most of which is grown right here in North America.

My answer is to wire the politicians to the Internet.

I liken security measures to wealth, invest the bulk of it at the very top of society and watch decency and honesty trickle down through the rest.

I figure a few tens of millions of dollars worth of wireless audio/video pick-ups for our political leaders would be a lot more cost effective at winning the war of terror than wiring hundreds of millions of us to their monitors.

Orwell had it all wrong, the telescreens should have been aimed the other way.

#11747 - your suspicions may have merit. According to an anonymous government agent, of the 325,000 international terrorism suspects, quadruple the number in 2003, on the NCC list, the vast majority are not US citizens and do not live in the US. The recently released “official statement” has them home-grown, communicating through the internet, and having “qualified ties” to AlQaeda.  The timing and content of this “new information” should arouse everyone’s suspicion.

Call me cynical, but whenever I hear vague, largely unsubstantiated claims about new terrorist threats (such as those uttered by National Counterterrorism Center Director Scott Redd) I worry instead about additional infringements on my privacy and civil liberties. There are legal mechanisms in place to identify, capture and convict criminals that don’t involve illegal wiretaps and other violations of my constitutional rights.

I figure the chances of my being killed by a terrorist are roughly equal to those of my dying of spontaneous human combustion—while threats to my freedom are increasing at an accelerating pace.

Thus begins the disinformation and propaganda campaign which, after net neutrality is voted out, will take the internet from us all.