Carpe Via

Here’s a scary example of over-reaction that I found today:

Chris, a grad student at Indiana University wrote this post on his blog about the loopholes in airport security and how we are essentially no safer than before.

This is no different from Senator Schumer’s post last February highlighting the same loopholes and describing step-by-step how a terrorist could easily get through security by simply printing their own boarding pass.

Except Chris added a bit of code in his post to make it easy for you to create your own boarding pass which will get you through security but not on a plane.

Ok, this may be illegal. I’m not sure. Perhaps in the same way a leader bears responsibility for telling his followers to break a law. Chris himself says, “I have not flown, or even attempted to enter the airport with one of these fake boarding passes. I haven’t even printed one out. All I have done is create a php script, which highlights a security hole made public by others before me.”

But it’s the over-reaction that scares me.

A congressman called for his arrest and it got covered in the news. The FBI then dropped by for a chat followed by a 2pm break-in to his house last night. He wasn’t there when it happened so he returned this morning to a ‘ransacked house’ and missing computer. The code, by the way, had only been up for two days and had been taken down the day before.

Yikes.

A public effort towards safer airports and this is the reaction. And why in the middle of the night?…

You can follow along and contribute to his defence fund on his blog here.

I’m doing that blogging thing that I don’t like to do -directing people to another article instead of writing my own. But once again Garrison Keillor says it better than I have been able to so far. Maybe because I am so frustrated and scared about these changes I see happening to my country. Or maybe because I’m a crap writer. In any case, here it is:

But now the federal government is extending the frontiers of terror with the Military Commissions Act, legalizing torture and suspending habeas corpus and constructing a loose web of law by which you and I could be hung by our ankles in a meat locker for as long as somebody deems necessary. “Any person is punishable…” the law states, “who knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States” and when it comes to deciding what “knowingly and intentionally” might mean or who is the enemy, that’s for a military commission to decide in secret, with or without you present. No Fifth Amendment, hearsay evidence admissible, no judicial review.

People came to America to escape this sort of justice. The midnight knock on the door, incarceration at the whim of men in shiny boots, confessions obtained with a section of hose, secret trial by star chamber. One is reminded of Germany, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give the Chancellor the power of summary arrest and imprisonment, a necessary tool for the defense of the homeland against traitors, Jew-lovers, terrorists.

He goes on to say funny things. He’s good that way. Makes the serious more poignant.