[Flaser]

How about not spending billions of dollars on security theater - at ports, airports, borders etc. as well as on wiretapping and data mining - and more money on actual anti-terrorist operations.

Which is plain old bribing agents in source countries, plain old detective work. How about a foreign policy, that accepts the fact the it's a product of long term negotiations and therefore seeks to create stable relationships based on mutual interest. Long term coexistence will lead to understanding and trust.

You can't bully or force the world into that - not while while trying to maintain a virginal facade of righteous and noble intervention. If there's a place for the counter pressure to escape, it will. Only total (and therefore totalitarian) show of force can bring about such massive changes. Unfortunately this tends to be you plain old genocide since a lot of people are *that* inflexible.

[Nuclear1]

Yes, Trashman, because I forgot all the Gitmo detainees that are getting lawyers. My mistake, of course the government wouldn't arrest someone on terrorism charges without a trial.

Oh wait.

Patriot Act. That's right.

This isn't paranoia, this is a rational fear based on what the government has been doing in my country.

And no amount of independent media or third party sources can change the fact that 75% of the 300 million American people just don't give **** enough/know any better to do anything to stop it. CNN, MSNBC, and all the newspapers in the country can scream bloody murder all they want, but there are still those who want to spread the "evil liberal media out to destroy America" bull**** and have the people blow off all of the warning signs of a police state.

Bomb al-Qaeda back into the stone age, put a bullet in Osama's brainpan, clamp al-Zarqawi in leg irons and cage him like an animal for the rest of his natural ****ing life, fine. Don't betray your countrymen's trust and fear and make them all guilty until proven innocent.

And no, at the rate the government is expanding its anti-terrrorism powers, we may be at a point soon where there won't be any checks or balances left to stop them. I'm not saying we should kill our domestic terror investigations or hogtie our police forces, but we have got to get a sensible head on our shoulders about these matters.  Wiretaps have stopped domestic terror plots and led to the capture of CIA moles before, and they can be done legally. What Bush has done is violate checks and balances on his power (there, see? already disappearing) by going around the courts to wiretap our citizens.

I don't really appreciate the naïve "It can't happen here, that's all stuff for fiction". It very well can, and it is happening. And it needs to stop, now.

[Flipside]

Fiction may be 'made up', but it is made up based around what we know, yes, the society in '1984' by Orwell was an exaggeration, and deliberately so, it was to emphasise the plight of the main character, but the society it is built in, even if a caricature of a Police State, is still based on a real and tangible possibility. Just like the story for Bioshock is not, in any way, factual, and yet is also a caricature of a society built purely upon the extremely capitalist views of Ayn Rand.

It's not just today that we have to concern ourselves with, say you are a staunch Republican and you are perfectly accepting of wiretapping as authorised by a Republican President. What happens if Obama gets in next time? You'll see a massive swing of opinion between the party supporters, all of a sudden it'll be those 'evil liberal Democrats, trying to move the Government into my front room'. And that's a best-case scenario.

It's not a question of what you have to hide really, it's a question of what will you have to hide in the future, the potential for a government to abuse that kind of surveillance, and the likelihood of them doing so is too great.

[karajorma]

Rampart paranoia. They will never do that. There aren't enough jails IN THE WORLD, let alone in the US for all the people badmouthing Bush.

The RIAA will never sue anyone for music piracy. There aren't enough courts IN THE WORLD for all the people downloading music.

[Mefustae]

Rampart paranoia. They will never do that. There aren't enough jails IN THE WORLD, let alone in the US for all the people badmouthing Bush.

Fun fact: The United States has the largest prison population in the world. 2.1 million, to be exact. That's more than 1% of the entire population behind bars. That's not because of rising crime, but rather harsher punishments, too.