On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:55 PM, Jacob Appelbaum <[email protected]> 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 -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected] or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
