How can we protect our chilldrun, when any six-year-old terrorist can take a plastic butter knife from the school cafeteria? (Link from Jimmy Wales)

Later:

. . . if the school insists on upholding the suspension, his parents reportedly will seek criminal charges against the school for supplying weapons to children.

My first reaction to such an approach is “Yow, go get em!”, but I fear it will be counterproductive in the long run. (Link from Rational Review News Digest)

Also from RRND: Santa Cruz County libraries strike back:

The signs, posted in the 10 county branches last week and on the library’s Web site, also inform the reader that the USA Patriot Act “prohibits library workers from informing you if federal agents have obtained records about you.”

(See also this which I linked in December.)
My one true ex keeps asking why I don’t get myself a library card.

Canadian in passport fiasco: US officials have once again deported a citizen of Canada – to Asia. Is it their goal to make travel through the US so infamously onerous that nobody (with a tan) tries it? (Link from Stephen Notley by way of Joshua Stanley.)

Yet another tale of petty banal evil.

There are plenty of stories like this these days. I don’t know how many I’ve read where the writer describes some breach of civil liberties by employees of the state, then wraps it all up with a dire warning about what we as a nation are becoming, and how if we don’t put an end to it now, then we’re in for heaps of trouble. Well you know what? Nothing’s going to stop the inevitable. There’s no policy change that’s going to save us. There’s no election that’s going to put a halt to the onslaught of tyranny. It’s here already — this country has changed for the worse and will continue to change for the worse. There is now a division between the citizenry and the state. When that state is used as a tool against me, there is no longer any reason why I should owe any allegiance to that state.

And that’s the first thing that child of ours is going to learn.

This, incidentally, is one of the many reasons I’m not about to have children; though I recognize enough hypocrisy in myself that I might change my mind if I should ever have the opportunity.

Five Technically Legal Signs for Your Library

Q. How can you tell when the FBI has been in your library?

A. You can’t.

the USAPATRIOT Act makes it illegal for us to tell you if our computers are monitored; be aware!

Plaintiff’s Consolidated Opposition to Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss in Gilmore v Ashcroft. Related items here. John Gilmore is challenging the secret regulation which supposedly requires passengers to either show an official annotated photograph (internal passport) or submit to search.

As things stand now, it seems the only ways to travel with one’s privacy rights intact are on foot (forbidden on most highways), on a bicycle (ditto), on a horse (?), or in a chartered private vehicle (putting the burden of identification on the driver/pilot).

An interesting item from the faq:

In 2000, scheduled air carriers carried almost 632 million passengers. If the same number of passengers fly in 2002, but instead of arriving at the airport 30 minutes before their flights, they arrive 2 hours before their flights, those passengers will have collectively spent more than 100,000 years sitting uselessly in airports or standing in line to be searched.

Contrast this to the lost lives of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks. If each of the approximately 3,300 people who died lost 35 years that they would have otherwise lived, then in total they lost about the same amount of time. Government-imposed searches waste as much life every year as the lifetimes that the attack wasted.

A correspondent asks:

Anyone else starting to wonder if the IAO isn’t a sacrificial Day-Glo “rabbit” intended to draw eyes away from the real danger buried somewhere in, say, the Department of Agriculture?

I am anticipating the day when the possession of Tibet and Afghanistan will be represented as vitally necessary to the security of Kansas and Nebraska. There is no logical end to this elastic conception of ‘security’ short of the conquest of the whole world.

Attributed to William Henry Chamberlin: “War – Shortcut to Fascism,” American Mercury LI, 204 (December 1940). In a .sig on the Armchair Economists mailing list.