BarlowFriendz: A Taste of the System
John Perry Barlow writes about the apparently limitless suspension of the Constitution that’s already happened in airports.
But randomly searching people’s homes against the possibility that someone might have a bio-warfare lab in his basement would reveal a lot of criminal activity. And it is certainly true that such searches would reduce the possibility of anthrax attacks and enhance public safety. Still, I doubt you’re ready to go there. Yet. Given a few exotic outbreaks, you might be. Should that day come, would you still believe such searches should not be precisely limited? This may seem hyperbolic, and of course it is, but it’s actually a fairly short conceptual distance away from what’s going on in the nation’s airports at present.
In a comment, John Gilmore writes:
TSA’s Gestapo behavior — violating your rights wholesale while keeping its own activities secret and unaccountable — is going to continue until you stop sheepishly putting up with it. Barlow and I are not going to stop it alone.
(Via an awful lot of people.)