Point, click, spy

You can bet those back doors are already in use by the criminal element. Not the government, I mean the OTHER criminal element.

As for me, I assume that any conversation I have over the net or phone is being recorded. Most likely it is, but regardless it is just prudence to believe it.

I'm not sure that you have to go THAT far, but the fact is that if those routers and switches have been exposed like that, then we are all much closer to being victims of crime than we used to be, and so some more precautions do have to be made...

California has had a system like that for years. I learned about when there was a story about a hacker who broke into the system and was using it to harass people.

I knew what was up with Clinton with the clipper chip. The news never understood that story. The point of mandating that every device have backdoor encryption available is that step two is outlawing all other encryption - it's been claimed that the NSA was pushing for that...

But that reminds me that all this wiretapping of overseas calls without a warrant was a minor story under Reagan. The story must have gotten bigger than I though if they actually outlawed the practice. Back then they claimed that overseas calls aren't "private". More NSA involvement in that story.

Call me naive, but two of the fundamental differences between Reagan and Dubya in the public's eye were that he could communicate and he genuinely believed in his rhetoric about freedom. Dubya has given us many reasons to believe that he's just reaching for more power that isn't his.

Uhm, under Bush, America was attacked on the mainland and under Reagan????

What reason did the Reagan admin have to be monitoring phone calls?

I think you have it backwards.

The reason Reagan got a free pass for bullshit was some strange way the whole fucking entire media down to the last drooling stock-room boy supported the cold war and spun for it. Don't ask me how that happened, I have no fucking clue.

But after the cold war ended, the shell broke and most of the journalists suddenly wanted to show how much they resented pretending to back the cold war (then why did you do it morons?).

So it's a new day for punkish journalism. Every journalist wants to show that he does not support his country and thinks the president is a stupid monkey, a bit of an extreme mirror image of the unsupportable rah rahs they all used to be.

Either way, journalists are extreme and senseless, and mostly hired because they're stupid enough to sell, sell, sell the news as if it was a great product rather than being a bunch of mostly baseless guesses made in a hurry by idiots who don't bother to understand anything. The news is a cheap, shoddy product, and the main qualification for being a journalist is being too stupid to realize that.

A few things to consider then, Josh:

1) The Soviet Union was a far more credible threat than Islamic terrorism. Most Islamic terrorists cannot even get here without our support, and the rest who do, can be kept out based on discriminatory policies and such. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was--and is--capable of destroying America. 1,000 9/11-level attacks wouldn't do anything more than leave our country bloodied and badly bruised. 1,000 Soviet strategic weapons deployments?...

2) Bush has assumed far more power than Reagan ever did. Bush has not once demonstrated that things like suspending the Writ of Habeus Corpus is necessary to fight terrorism. Then there is the quasi-torture that he pushed for, something that scares the hell out of a lot of decent Americans who are otherwise hawkish because of the moral ramifications and long-term reputation problems. Reagan's response to terrorist attacks on Americans, in terms of civil liberties, was far more in proportion to the level of threat, than Bush's. If anything, you would think that America was hit with a megaton nuclear weapon on 9/11 with how much the federal government has grown in size and power since then.

3) Let's face it, Reagan was also a far more effective leader than Bush is. One of the things that an effective leader has to be able to do is roll with criticism and hit back when necessary. Bush has allowed the media to defeat him. The relationship between a president who rolls over at the first sign of anger from the media will be the same as a man who does the same with a woman.

Consider:
1. The soviets were rational and materialistic - they could be deterred.
2. Their idiology, (offically, not say, what Stalin and Lenin practiced) was fairly humanitarian.

compare with

Islamists are fucking insane, more than willing to commit genocide and more than willing to hurt and kill their own people and not necessarily deterable. A close look at attitudes and reactions in the Muslim world shows that Muslims are not at all bothered when Muslims of their own kind are killing, no matter WHO they're killing. Given the things Mohammad said and did, they may even find it comforting when Muslims commit atrocities because it shows that they're taking their rightful place as overlords.

As for capability, combine the facts that:
1. It is always inherently impossible to protect completely and easy to destroy. It takes a lifetime to grow a man, and a moment to kill him.

2 The advance of technology means that, eventually, it will be possible for anyone to commit a mass atrocity to any scale. There are no inherent limits to how much destruction can be created easily.. Consider that releasing a virus could do so much more damage than a fucking H-bomb that nukes are now considered the SECOND tier of WMDs. And chemicals can be made more simply than viruses. etc...

In short, the Russians weren't such a great threat for the last few decades of the cold war.

But it comes down to will, now.

The Islamists could end our way of life, because they have the will to harm no matter how much damage we inflict on their side. And our will to counter attack - to lay waste to an enemy, is waning.

PC America may not have the will to deter them.

So I disagree that we're not facing a great threat, but it's not a entirely immediate one, I hope.

You do raise some valid points, such as their willingness to kill indiscriminately and the threat of bioweapons. However, I still stand by my point that they do not justify what Bush is doing. If anything, Bush's response should be to spend money on building effective counter-measures because the odds are ludicrous that we could prevent a WMD from being smuggled into the United States by a sophisticated party interested in doing so. Police powers are now not as important as technological means to counter the WMD threat, such as better biotechnology and methods to detect nuclear weapons.

Right now, a rogue government could smuggle a nuclear bomb into one of our ports via a cargo container, and chances are we would only know about it when it goes off. The possibilities are endless of how it could go wrong, and I think the only two things that will alleviate any of that are technology and the grace of God.

You're contradicting yourself in a single comment, and I must say that I agree with MikeT but not at all with MikeT :)

You're correct when you say that the odds are "ludicrous that we could prevent a WMD from being smuggled into the United States" but I believe that you're wrong in assuming that technology can change this situation all that much.

Where it can help is surveillance. But to agree to that, you have to agree to the usual loss of liberty that goes along with a hot war, without the hot war.

Another thing that makes a difference is to take the traditional war-stance of trying to look like a very very dangerous and nearly crazed mad dog rather than like PC boobs, apologizing for even breathing. You have to scare your enemies.

We took that a bit too far in the cold war, where it has been argued that we fought the Vietnam war in order to look crazy enough to make our nuclear deterrent work in Europe, where, rationally, it could be assumed that we wouldn't really start a nuclear war, just to prevent an invasion of allies.

In any case, I think that GW is attempting something very deep - to create a sea change in middle eastern culture. To bring even a hint of liberal democracy to any Arabs would be to break down a cultural wall that's infinitely higher than the Iron curtain ever was.

He may fail, but he's really attempting the only things that have a chance of making a real difference.

There are only two scenarios that lead to permanent security for the planet:
1. The culture of Islamic countries changes and opens drastically.
2. We become monsters who show a willingness to genocide - and we slaughter so many of our enemies that they give up Mohammad's own goals, permanently. We defeat a religion.

In a way 2 is like 1 in that it depends on cultural change, but it's cultural change through immeasurable tragedy.

Actually there's a third possibility, the extinction of the human race. That's peace of a sort.

Sorry, I'm not buying the "it's a power grab" narrative. We face a serious problem, or at least some people (such as me) believe we do. I believe that GW sincerely believes the same.

Also, you only mentioned countries as actors. But Muslims don't think in terms of "country".

Remember the cleric who was convicted of participating in the Bali bombing?

He was convicted of treason. Hanging offense right? Only among non-Muslims. He got a slap on the wrist and all of the policemen and politicians wanted to be seen with their arms around him and shaking his hands, even as he went to jail. And was let out a year early.

Country isn't important to them. Treason - only a sign of being a holy man.

Of course one sounds extreme when one hopes to turn this horrible situation into permanent peace and security - to wish to fix the world.

I haven't given up on the vision of a future for humanity that's better than the past. But many people, or even most, faced with such stanch opposition prefer to give up all of their ideals and hopes for the future.

Though I admit the question of ideals comes down to time-horizon. I try to suss out the future and preserve my ideals in a very long time frame. Other people prefer to neglect the future and preserve, for the present moment only, the peace-time stance that seemed ideal, then.

The reason that I think that focusing on technology and basic government work, like hiring more border patrol agents and squaring away our immigration problems, is the answer is because you cannot predict the future. People have already largely stopped trying to predict how things will work out in the next ten years, let alone in the next two or three generations! One of the very promising things that is coming over the horizon is the advent of cars that don't rely on fossil fuels. Without the money from fossil fuel sales, the terror-supporting governments will end up collapsing.

You wonder why I think that last point is so important? There are no serious terrorists that can operate without government support today. You look at every leading terrorist group in the Islamic world, and you will see at a minimum a government doing nothing, and often governments funding, training and arming them. Where would Al Qaeda be without the protection money of the Saudi royal family, or Hezbollah without Iran's assistance? Without the state sponsors, they become little more than armed, crazed gangs capable of little more than random violence.