[liberationtech] And right on cue, the flush our civil liberties down the toilet boys rear their ugly heads

[Maxim Kammerer]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:55 PM, Jacob Appelbaum <jacob at appelbaum.net> wrote:
> I find it telling that the local news papers in Seattle referred to
> their photos as 'potential suspects' on the front page. The use of
> language is telling - it suggests that to be suspect is to be guilty. I
> wouldn't be surprised if we saw people using the word potential as a
> subtle replacement for suspect in the near future again and again.

I am not a native English speaker, but even if I do something as
simple as going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspect, I immediately
find a verbose explanation concluding with:
“Possibly because of the misuse of suspect to mean perpetrator, police
in the early 21st century began to use person of interest, possible
suspect, and even possible person of interest, to mean suspect.”

So I don't understand your objection to language being something that
evolves. This reminds me of this hilarious tweet:
https://twitter.com/evacide/status/264438312675201025 — “Phishing is
not hacking. End of story.” — I guess that pointing out that hacking
is anything but cracking ceased to be fashionable a decade ago.

Now, closer to the subject of this thread. US homeland security is a
joke, as is clear from the latest events (that were, like usual, blown
outside of all proportions in the US however one looks at them, hence
those little armies running around your suburbia — but that's beside
the point). So it's no surprise that e.g. DHS will try to put the
blame on something it needs but apparently lacks, like more
surveillance. The way to oppose that is not to provide arguments that
the present amount of surveillance is already too much (you will
probably lose), but to expose the incompetence of your homeland
security by forcing it to face two simple questions: (1) Why did it
fail to profile two Muslim extremists as potential grassroots
Jihadists via social media analysis that is already available to the
relevant services (e.g., see @AndreiSoldatov's tweets and writeup);
and (2) Why did the huge homeland security apparatus fail to prevent
the bombing at the tactical level (e.g., is your Police force capable
of doing something actually useful, like detecting suspicious people
in a mass gathering and checking them, or is that intellectual
capacity only reserved to Secret Service and the like). Of course, I
am not holding my breath, since asking such questions will require
forgoing the usual calming excuse of a “disturbed individual” any time
a Muslim in a Western country takes Jihadist preachings too close to
heart, but I do believe the incompetence exposing approach could be
effective in this case.

--
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte