[TriLUG] Re: TriLUG digest, Vol 1 #38 - 30 msgs (intentionally preseved as its a reaction to several messageS)

[acoliver]

On Tue, 11 Sep 2001, John Turner wrote:

>> The reaction you and Mr Rhodes have is normal. But I am guessing many
>> of the families of the victims would give up some of their rights to
>> have their family members back. I think that we must obtain a balance
>> and if that means more government control to stop future large scale
>> events like this, then I think it needs to be considered and not just
>> toss out as a non-option.

>yes, well, do a google for reichstag fire.
>
>- donald

+1 !

Due to the magnitude of this I'll withdrawl my usual policy of only
admonishing long off topic threads.  My family was fortunate.  Had the forth
plane hit the Capitol or White House I might have lost relatives as well. 
With that being said. I object to the idea that withdrawing our troops into
US borders is the right move.  We are now the biggest, we have to be the
baddest.  History repeats this lesson over and over.  The price of freedom
is eternal vigilence.  The US and its allys need to form and extensive and
well funded intelligence network, a cooperative network.  I'm sick of
hearing about "compelling US interest", there is no where in the world that
there is no longer a compelling US interest.  There is an interest in
security, we must act upon it not by witdrawing into our borders as we did
after world war I, but by becoming more involved.  Frequently, I hear of
Vietnam when speaking about this.  The lessons of vietnam are consistantly
misinterperated.  In vietnam we interfered in a local civil war that was not
ethnically related.  We interfered in a revolution against colonialism
(which happened to be "communist") and propped up a puppet government.  We
consistantly botched coming up with decisive military objectives/goals and
consistantly escalated our presence.  This is not a good argument against
intervening everywhere.  From this point forward we must resign ourselves to
be involved and engaged with our allies.  We must stop wasting money on
useless politically motivated technically unfeasible (at least according to
one nobel prize winner and several lead cornell researchers) defense
systems.  

With all of that rant.  I think more on topic.  Regarding the encryption
stuff.  Perhaps the way we usually going about this, objecting to the
proposals and fighting them is not as effective as we hope.  Perhaps a more
effective way to do it is to come up with counter-proposals.  Fight the bad
idea--yes (!)--but also provide a counter proposal that achieves the
intended objective (fight child pornography, stop criminals/terrorists from
getting away using encryption, etc).

-andy