“The Democrats criticized Bush for suspension of civil liberties and guaranteed them in their 2008 platform. In their 2012 platform, those guarantees have all been erased.”
I don’t really recommend the EFF/Al-Jazeera article – the author seems to think that suggesting that black people are too incompetent to get picture ID is somehow a blow struck for civil rights – but the general theme is pretty clear. It turns out that liberals are actually, shock, happy to use the power of the State to enforce social and domestic policy! Which is great when a libertarian agrees with that policy; when they don’t? …Not so much.
As I said, almost funny. The joke kind of loses something after the sixtieth or so time you see somebody fall for it.
Moe Lane
Via Instapundit.
The look on their faces when they get the ‘midnight knock on the door’ will be funnier still.
Yes, Lourae .. but then who will object when they come for me?
Sometimes, we need our useful idiots, even while cursing their blind stupidity.
Mew
I guess the difference is you and I know that under Barack Obama, that knock will come. And will do everything in our power to see it never comes to that.
Even more funny: Obama signed his executive order for ’emergency internet protocols’ into virtual law. Meaning he’s going to push for the internet kill switch.
But only on crazy-right-wingers, I’m sure.
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the WWW, says there’s no internet kill-switch, and no possible way to create one.
Not that King Putt wouldn’t love to try…
Yeah, I heard T B-L say that, because 90% of it is in private hands. But methinks his idea of private might not coincide with mine. Academic institutions, corporations w/ lucrative gov’t projects, you think they wouldn’t hand over the keys to the Fed Gov’t? Let alone prog-rat run services like Google, Twitter, and Facebook.
Might not shut it down completely, but they’d do a pretty good job of making it almost unusable for as long as they wanted.
90% in private hands is irrelevant. The only relevant question is what fraction of the traffic flows through a “small” number of points, and govts can easily occupy 1000s of points.
Intra-Europe may be different, but US traffic is easily controllable because there aren’t that many long distance link points.
And then there’s a DNS-based approach….
It is really amazing how foolish and unaware some people are. Obama’s proclivities were never really that secret, but now people act surprised. Where have they been all these years?
Corey Doctorow needs to stop referring to himself in any was as a libertarian. The man is an Obama partisan, no different than any other party-line Democrat.
It doesn’t matter if you oppose NDAA somewhere deep down in your secret heart, Mr. Doctorow, if you keep carrying water for the guy who signed it.
What these liberaltarians just found out is leftist dems always support civil liberties, for leftist dems, for anybody else, not so much.
There really can’t be a complete internet kill-switch…
Nice thing about mesh-type networks: if you break one route, the network just finds a new one…
Sure, the internet can be slowed down… It can maybe even be messed up to the point where youtube-gobbly-gook can’t flow like it does today…
But text based data will still be able to move – maybe not on Facebook… But by E-mail, FTP, and no-frills text-based HTTP…
Similarly, the US government no longer controls all the DNS root servers… Shutting down the roots would provide no security/control advantage, it would just fork the ‘undesirables’ off into their own private DNS system….