Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

A disturbingly predictable response to the WTC attacks has been the rush to exploit the mass media driven hysteria to vastly expand the power and scope of intrusive government. Congress has abandoned even its usual pretense of purpose with its passage of the massive new "anti-terrorism" bill.

In one of many disturbing historical parallels, the new bill - containing hundreds of pages of new transfers of power from the citizens to the government - was switched at the last minute with a far less intrusive bill that had already been approved in committee. The substitute bill, filled with new infringements on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, was then rushed through Congress without debate - or even being read - by elected representatives who were too busy posing for the cameras, and "doing something just to be seen to be doing something", to fulfill their oaths of office, or do their duty for their constituents and nation.

Deceptively labeled "anti-terrorist", the legislation actually passed by Congress is little more than a catalog of expanded powers frustrated power-hungry bureaucrats have long lusted after, but were denied in more rational times. Justified by claims that government agencies need broad new powers to combat terrorists, the legislation contains almost nothing actually targeted at terrorists. A careful analysis of the new law reveals it to be in reality a broad ranging assault on the rights of those same freeman citizens it claims to protect.

The mass media has carried a lot of coverage of our elected representatives belatedly dismissing the alarm of a growing number of Americans at the intrusions on their freedom contained in the "anti-terrorist" bill, by claiming that these new government powers are "sunsetted" to expire in 4 years. What isn't as well publicized is that the "sunset" provisions in the bill only apply to a few of the provisions in the legislation. Most of the new powers government is granting itself are exempt from the sunset provisions, and thereby mark a permanent change in the relationship between the people and "their" government.

Among these permanent new government powers is essentially a "blank check" to conduct warrant-less searches of private communications on the Internet. Surveillance of the public Internet is perhaps the least justified of all the new expansions of government power.

The FBI has been the most vocal advocate of this new power, claiming it needs wide ranging authority to spy on private citizens in order to stop fight terrorism. But it wasn't a lack of information that caused the intelligence failures prior to the 9-11 attacks. The primary problem was the internal culture of the FBI itself.

The FBI failed to efficiently process the information it had acquired through already existing means, refused to allow citizens to submit information that didn't support with the official direction of the agency's investigations, and continued its long established practice of refusing to share information. The FBI's institutional culture of self-serving failures endanger the American people, but acomplish the "higher purpose" of protecting the FBI from being embarrassed by another agency making use of information the FBI had decided to ignore.

Rewarding the repeated failures of the FBI by turning them loose to misuse and abuse the confidential information of freemen citizens won't make the FBI any more effective at stopping terrorists. It will, however, undoubtedly improve the agency's performance in its traditional abuses of power - eliminating political dissent, and "pacifying" civilian resistance to the expanding power of the state.

At least for the short term.

A major flaw in the new Internet surveillance powers government has granted itself is that they're based on the assumption that private Internet communications will continue to be sent in plain text. The idea that gaining the power to eavesdrop automatically grants access to the content of a suspect's conversations is a hold-over from the previous generation of voice telephones. But this assumption only appears to apply to the Internet because users' have until now had a reasonable expectation that their privacy was being respected by the self-interested commercial server operators. The expanded Internet surveillance powers of the "anti-terrorism" bill will now create an expectation in the minds of many users that there probably is an internet monitoring program spying on everything they say or do on the Internet.

If the thought that the government's Internet surveillance software is watching your every move doesn't worry you, consider that the software spying on you will have been created by the same incompetents responsible for the monumental computer disasters at the FAA, IRS, HUD, and DOD.

Of course, the most consistant feature of these massive blunders has been their capability to run up outragous cost-overruns the taxpayer inevitably ends up paying the lowest bidder. Mercifly, most government software failures intended to benefit the citizens are abandoned before ever being used, and only cost the taxpayers a few billion of their hard earned dollars. Alas, the same can't be said for government software projects intended to infringe on the rights of citizens - they're always rushed into use regardless of how badly flawed they may be.

Consider that every second they manage to keep this bad idea expressed in computer code running, will be another second spent searching through your private communications for isolated typos, and incautious thoughts shared with friends in the heat of the moment. Every second it manages to avoid crashing, this death dealing software will be rumaging through your private information, searching for any series of bytes snatched out of the data stream that can be twisted and distorted into budget building justifications for lethal pre-dawn paramilitary "investigations" by black hooded "anti-terrorist" storm troopers.

The primary response of the real terrorists to the new "anti-terrorist" Internet surveillance measures is likely to be self-satisfied congratulations on a job well done. Their ultimate goal, after all, is to turn America on itself - to use their extremely limited ability to attack unarmed innocent citizens to manipulate America into destroying itself as their unwitting proxy.

It doesn't matter to the terrorists whether the hated intellectual freedom of the Internet is eliminated by overt government regulation and censorship, or by the growing fear among users that a carelessly typed word, or accidental visit to the wrong website, might result in a midnight knock on the door. Either way the hated freedom of the Internet will have been defeated. Either way the terrorists win.

The new "anti-terrorist" surveillance measures are unlikely to cause much actual inconvenience for real terrorists. Considering the availability of strong encryption to the average business or citizen, it would seen a pretty safe bet that any real terrorists smart enough to pose a threat, are also smart enough to use strong encryption when discussing their crimes against humanity over any transmission media that might be monitored by their intended victims. In fact, I'd say the odds are pretty high that they'll continue using the state-of-the-art military grade secure communications technology the Clinton Administration gave their sponsor nations.

It's the freemen citizens who think they "don't have anything to hide", who should be terrified by government agencies whose power and budgets depend on finding "dangerous terrorists" using the Internet. Unable to find real terrorists foolish enough to openly declare their intentions, the newly empowered name-less, face-less paper shuffling bureaucrats will inevitably seek to justify their budgets by "finding" whoever does fall within their grasp. They will inevitably focus their attention on citizens whose momentary indiscretions can be misrepresented as "terrorism" within a politically correct zero tolerance interpretation of the vaguely worded "anti-terrorism" bill.

The actual guilt or innocence of the accused no longer matters since the "anti-terrorist" bill essentially grants the government the power to simply disappear anyone accused of "terrorism" into the vast government prison system, cut off from all contact for as long as anyone on the outside still remembers his name, without ever having to file formal charges - let alone having to prove the suspect's actual guilt before a jury of his peers.