Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 07:26:36 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com> Cc: Milo Hyson <milo@cyberlifelabs.com>, Help Victims <fight_terrorism@yahoo.com>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Helping victims of terror Message-ID: <3BA0C21C.8F32EFA5@mindspring.com> References: <20010912215547.98067.qmail@web20806.mail.yahoo.com> <20010912225151.58FCD37B40B@hub.freebsd.org> <01091219512600.11358@proxy.the-i-pa.com>
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Bill Moran wrote: > Basically, I see it this way. Violence is a sign of immaturity. There are > a LOT of immature people in this world. President Bush appears to be > intent on proving to the world just how immature the United States is > by rewarding violence with more violence. I hope the world grows up > before it destroys itself. Read your history, WW I took far less violence > than this to start. We're travelling down a familiar road right now, and the > street signs say WW III. The parallels with WW I and WW II (the events with the Archiduke Ferdinand as the target of an assinations are certianly the more apt parallel) are hardly comparable; the Japanese attack on Perl Harbor is a much more apt analogy (note: the Japanese lost many people in the events in New York, as well; potentially in the hundreds -- as did Australia, the U.K., and other countries; this was not technically an attack on the U.S. alone). I rather expect that death is the only thing that can be an adequate barrier for the protection of the general population from people who are willing to die for their political beliefs. The question then becomes not whether death will be the basis for the resolution of such a political conflict, but rather whether it will be yours, or that of your opponents. If we "permit" them to die for those beliefs in a way controlled by us, rather than by them, the amount of damage they inflict on society can be minimized. In the end, it comes down to the killing of human beings as a great wrong, and whether or not one's actions can remove one from the set of human beings. > On a more FreeBSD related note, do you think this will provoke the US > government to create restrictions hurtful to the free software community? > Such as crypto restrictions, or new laws allowing the government to invade > our privacy as we use the internet? All in the name of "protecting the > country from possible terrorist threats?" Could pgp be outlawed? This will certainly depend on the eventual identity of the perpetrators, who as yet remain incompletely identified. For example only, Osama bin Ladden's organization is well known to have used stegnographic techniques to encrypt data sent to operatives in cells in the U.S. in the past. At this point, that means that traffic monitoring may become a priority, and the issue will not be one of ITAR restrictons, so much as it will be one of reducing chaff that needs to be decoded so that undesirable payloads can be easily sorted from the rest of the data. There is already considerable backlash against the U.S. and other Intelligence communities over "why didn't you see this coming and warn us?!?" -- an attitude coolly at odds with the uproar over the "black budget" National Satellite Reconnisance Center over a year agao, when their billion dollar plus building and installation were discovered by an oversight committee and used to make political hay. I generally expect that we will end up with onerous restrictions on air travel, including things designed to appease the public with the idea that air travel is now safer than it was previously, due to those onerous restrictions. This may include things which are actually safety downgrades, such as physically seperating the pilot and passenger cabins, so that it's impossible for the flight crew to come into physical contact with passengers (or to, for example, help extinguish fires in the main cabin). It may just mean armed air marshalls on every flight, from whom guns can be obtained by force. I also suspect that we will see the general installation of face recognition cameras and software in all major transportation hubs, with the recent events as justification, even though we do not have pictures of most of the men, even after that fact, from which such software would be capable of extracting matches. We already know that "level 4 security" minimally involves limiting carry on luggage -- including prohibitions on women's purses. So I really expect us to have a considerable invasion of privacy "for our protection", with no real tactical or strategic value (or protection) actually coming from such an invasion. David Brin predicted this in his book "Transparent Society" (of course; just as G. Harry Stine predicted the reaction to the Challenger disaster, and Tom Clancy's novel about the disaffected Japanese Commercial airline pilot crashing a plane into a joint session of Congress parallel's Tuesdays events). The major impact I see on the software front is that government agencies are bound to attempt to delay deployment of IPSEC in Microsoft products, which will in turn delay its deployment in the Internet, since until Microsoft supports it by default, no one will rely on it in place of SSL in order to achieve secure connections for the purposes of commerce (this on top of the already existing handicap of being insufficiently assymetric, relative to SSL, with regards to automatic key negotiation). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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