Xah Lee's Unixism

[Jeff Shannon]

Chuck Dillon wrote:

>> abridgement of
>> civil liberties (as in the Patriot Act and the Gitmo gulag),
>
>
> [...] How many U.S. citizens have been victimized?  


That's the problem -- we have *no* way of finding out, because part of 
the Patriot Act is a gag rule that prevents the public from knowing how 
it's used.  It *may* be a small number, and we'd all like to think that 
it is, but we really don't know.

> How many dead U.S. citizens does it take to justify that 
> victimization?  Both numbers are quire small.


Here there's a lot of room to disagree -- it's a tragedy when U.S. 
citizens are killed, but it's an even greater tragedy when the entirety 
of the U.S. loses its freedoms in the name of "security".

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary 
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety," as Benjamin Franklin said.  
The Patriot Act takes away our liberty in the name of temporary safety.  
We need better security than we had pre-9/11, certainly, but we can get 
it with a much lower cost to our personal liberty than has come with the 
Patriot Act.  We *don't* need secret police investigations, secret 
courts, and secret detentions for secret reasons.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International