Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants to read your email. Apparently the "right to privacy" only exists between a woman and her abortion provider. Although it's probably unfair to say that Ms. Napolitano personally wants to read your email.
It's much more likely that she wants to set up a few new government agencies, hire thousands of people on the taxpayers' dime (don't forget about those bloated government pensions!), and have them read your email. So it might be a moot point anyway, since we all know how effective government agencies are -- been to the DMV lately?
Why does Ms. Napolitano want to read your email? To fight terrorism, of course! How silly to even ask. It turns out that terrorists like to communicate with one another via Internet communications. The panty-bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and Jihad Jane are all big fans of Internet communications.
From the Associated Press:
Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation's homeland security chief said Friday.
"The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet," Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
As is usually the case when Janet Napolitano opens her mouth, I have a hard time cataloguing everything that's wrong with what she says.
Let's start with the Constitution, shall we? This is not about the first amendment; it's about the fourteenth. The fourteenth amendment deals with the state and any person's right to life, liberty, or property -- specifically that the state can't seize it without due process of law. Big Brother isn't allowed to open my personal snail mail letters without a warrant, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and apply the same rule to electronic mail.
Moving on to civil liberties trade-off. Let me translate that for you: Loss of civil liberties. What happens when liberty is lost? Tyranny. Raise your hand if you like the idea of living in a tyrannical nation. No one? Is this thing on? Bueller?
Napolitano also states that we must beef up national security. Funny, I thought the system worked. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Now to the heart of the matter: Blaming the Internet for terrorism is like blaming guns for murders, or blaming spoons for obesity. The Internet, firearms, and eating utensils are all tools; nothing more and nothing less. No amount of regulating, banning, or monitoring these tools will change the behavior of the people that use them.
Instead of monitoring private Internet communications, maybe Janet Napolitano could work on an effective plan for actually combating terrorism. I'll throw an idea out there -- instead of worrying about terrorists' rights, why don't we punish them so severely that the next guy will think twice before stuffing a bomb in his underwear?
Just a thought.
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Comments 8
Where is the liberal ire now?
If we don't go vote and get rid of the unconstitutional rhetoric and B S that" they need" to take all our made up terror on this so called mess that if you look back on even to nine eleven i.e. when the twin towers fell they fell straight down not sideways but straight down. If you have seen any type of demolition you would know when a building falls straight down that someone has put explosives at every cross beam and load baring structure otherwise the fire from the planes would have burned upward but even if the entire building burned the structure would not fall straight down. I spent twenty plus years with people who blow things up for a living in the US ARMY so think about this the next time you get a chance to vote because this right will be gone soon if we don't vote and get every single incumbent out of office fill our government with new blood and wash out the old stinky blood that has been ruining our country for years.
Yours truly U.S. Army retired
But were you OK with the Bush administration listening in to all our phone calls and being in cahoots with the private phone service providers to do it?
Love love love your idea at the end, Jenny! And yes, electronic mail should be treated like snail mail. And I don't believe the system worked at all, not then, and not now. And reading MY email won't help a thing!
lol Pundit mom- Just because I'm a Republican doesn't mean that I agree with everything that Bush did. I disagree with a LOT, actually. :-)
Napolitano isn't blaming the Internet, at least, not in the part you quoted. She is right that terrorists use the Internet to comminicate because that's one of the things that it does better than almost any other medium.
Now for a little lesson in technology. Email is sent in what we in the industry call "plain-text." That means it's not encrypted and it is capable to be read by anyone on any server or network link between you and your recipient. It's sort of like a post card. The thing is, there are very simple encryption tools out there which anyone, including terrorists, can use to ensure their messages are not read. (See http://www.gnupg.org/) Even if Napolitano tries this unconstitutional practice, she'll won't get anything on the terrorists. Like every encroachment on civil liberties, this will damage law abiding citizens more than it will criminals.
"The system worked" comment has been taken out of context. The "system" in that case was the coordinated response to the attack, after it happened.
The internet isn't being blamed for causing terrorism. Terrorists use the internet to quickly and efficiently communicate with other terrorists in a low-profile way. DHS employees aren't going to read the innumerable every-day-emails of over 200,000,000 users. That kind of manpower doesn't exist. DHS would monitor individuals they have reasons to be suspicious of. If you want to effectively combat terrorism you must let them do their jobs because they're the experts. No punishment would, to quote the article, "change the behavior of the people" committing terrorist acts.