Somewhere deep in my heart, I actually have sympathy for the folks at the Department of Homeland Security. I mean… imagine if the president of the United States came to you and said “Hey [you]… you’re now in charge of preventing terrorist attacks in the United States”. Jesus! Where would you even begin to do that job? And once you start looking for terrorist scenarios, you can find them almost anywhere. A terrorist could get a job at an airport and plant a bomb on a plane. He could rent a tanker truck and blow it up on the Golden Gate Bridge. He could fire an RPG at the New York Stock Exchange. He could blow up an electric substation here in Charlotte and bring Bank of America to its knees. He could even do something as simple as dump a bucket of LSD into a reservoir. Lord knows that chemistry students in college have been whipping up batches for years… a dedicated team of terrorists could easily cook up enough acid to plunge Los Angeles or Boston into chaos.
Up until now, I’ve been pretty quiet about us losing our liberties to the jackboots at DHS. After all, most of the hassles ordinary Americans have to deal with come at the airport, and if recent reports are any indication, people are becoming so fed up with air travel that something will have to change in the next couple of years, or else the airline industry will collapse. And I’m confident that that “something” will, in fact, happen.
But I have now officially “had it” with DHS and the whole “War on Terror”. What caused this change of heart? The recent news that agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may now seize laptop computers and other electronic devices from travelers entering the United States. It’s important to understand that the people that own these devices need not be suspected of anything, much less actually charged with a crime. Not only that, they can hold the items for any amount of time that they wish, and they can share the private data on those laptops with other government agencies, and even non-government agencies contracted to do government work. And no, this doesn’t apply to just foreign nationals entering the United States… it applies to anyone entering the country – even American citizens! And although the government swears that any copies made of your personal data will be destroyed, the agencies are actually empowered to keep any notes they make whilst examining your laptop, pager, cellphone, iPod, or any other device.
Fuck that… and fuck you, Michael Chertoff. Do you honestly think that anything productive could ever come of this policy? Please, Mr. Jerkoff, show me one example of where this policy has stopped a terrorist attack. Just one.
In an op-ed piece in the USA Today last month, Herr Himmler Mr. Chertoff assured us that “”the most dangerous contraband is often contained in laptop computers or other electronic devices” and that DHS searches have uncovered “violent jihadist materials as well as images of child pornography”.
Kiddie porn? Really? Really? Look, I hate child pornographers as much as the next person. Hell, if I were Emperor of the United States, I’d order every person convicted of child pornography to be hanged by their balls until they fall off, then lock the bastards in a sewer until they die of gangrene from their infected wounds. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna trample all over the Constitution of the United States just to lock up the occasional idealistic Muslim college kid with a “Fuck America” essay on his laptop or some damn pervert with kiddie porn.
I mean, does Mr Jerkoff really think that the next Mohamed Atta is going to try and enter the United States with his complete “Plans of Destruction” on his laptop? And why the hell would he? In case Mr Jerkoff hasn’t heard, there’s this newfangled thing out there called the Internet, and terabytes worth of data moves through it every day. And there are so many techniques for hiding data (not to mention billions of places to hide it) that it makes the very idea of the need for this policy laughable.
While it will be a great day for America when the Bush Administration leaves DC, Michael Chertoff needs to go now. Did you know, for example, that he can waive almost any law he sees fit in order to accomplish his hazily-defined goal of “securing America”? And Chertoff did just that with the new border fence down Mexico way. Read this article if you don’t believe me. Chertoff personally signed waivers for “more than 30 laws” with might “interfere” with the construction of the border fence. This “includ[es] laws protecting the environment, endangered species, migratory birds, the bald eagle, antiquities, farms, deserts, forests, Native American graves and religious freedom”. According to the New York Times:
The secretary of homeland security was granted the power in 2005 to void any federal law that might interfere with fence building on the border. For good measure, Congress forbade the courts to second-guess the secretary’s determinations. So long as Mr. Chertoff is willing to say it is necessary to void a given law, his word is final.
Do you understand what this means? We’re no longer a nation of laws, but a nation of men. And Michael Chertoff can waive any law – any law at all – in order to make us safe. Chertoff has even stooped to threatening the governor of Montana to get his way with the REAL-ID act.
This is unacceptable, and I won’t stand for it. As Thomas Jefferson so eloquently said:
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither. If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.