CelticBear’s Musings

(Or at all, really. I had to finally read the Bible myself to learn about these religious atrocities.)

Friendly Atheist features a review and some illustrations from the book Illustrated Stories from the Bible (that they won’t tell you in Sunday School) by Paul Farrell:

• Illustrated Stories from the Bible

It’s one thing to hear about or read about Judeo-Christian god’s psychopathic blood lust and sociopathic amoral personality, but it puts it in a whole new light when you see it illustrated.

Hemant goes easy on Christians by acknowledging there’s a lot of “good stuff” in the Bible as well. And there are. But one has to ask, at what point does one’s belief that a book is holy and the intended Word of God become strained knowing that the divinely ordained horrors within outweigh the good? I can think of a great many more books that have a much higher ratio of “good” to “horrifically disgusting”–why aren’t they revered and worshiped and followed as instruction books to live one’s life by?

At what point is a person forced to reevaluate the book they put on a pedestal (sometimes literally) and realize this is no book worthy of such reverence. When is a book so riddled with cherry-picking that it’s no longer a viable and valid as a tool for worldly or even spiritual guidance?

I’m seriously asking here.

This is too brilliantly funny!

(hat tip to Humanist Mama)

This is a very, very scary time we live in right now. Jack Cafferty has a fantastic although disheartening commentary on CNN.com right now:

• Commentary: Is McCain another George W. Bush?

He talks about how McCain was at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy (likely got into the Navy through his Admiril dad), has no intellectual curiosity, is only capable of speaking in canned responses, is good with a quip or a jibe but can’t think on his feet…he’s very much a Bush pt. 2:

George Bush’s record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.

He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens’ faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.

I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

The fact that we may get John McCain as President is scary enough. But what magnifies the fear a hundred-fold is comments from “ordinary people” like this one from a “Jimmy P”:

I certianly hope so! Because whether you liberal pansys like it or not, it’s this administration’s policies that have kept the homeland from being hit again. Don’t think for a minute that these lunatics, that fools like Obama would attempt to negotiate with, wouldn’t hit us here at home if possible. We are not entitled to unlimited civil liberties - check my phone, pc, bank account, who cares! Fascism is the best form of government! The majority of people are unable to run their own lives in a responsible manner. To he** with Democracy, it’s a failed experiment!

Is that an ironic, joke comment? Based on similar sentiments I’ve seen elsewhere, I doubt it. While so far that’s the most fanatic response on the CNN.com post. half the comments are from people who are supporting McCain for his rhetoric against terrorism and bashing Obama for his desire for diplomacy. (Yeah, because Nixon didn’t think to use diplomacy dealing with the Chinese who were fueling the Viet Nam war from that side ot it. He blew them off the face of the Earth, right?)

Many people hate to foster the supposedly illusionary division in this country they think is a manufacturing of the media and their color-coded states; but regardless of “red” or “blue” state coloring, there IS two Americas: one that believes the President should be a smart, educated, versatile, adaptable, statesman; and another that believes the President should be a butt-kickin’ regular joe who takes no guff and will show the rest of the world who’s boss. The former believes there’s a balance between security and civil liberties and cares about how the country is run and how healthy it and its citizens are, the other seems to not care less about other people so long as they can say they’re winning a foreign war.

I see this division every day at work, I read about it all over the blogonets, I hear it all over the radio. It’s a very real and deep division, and I really have no idea how it can possibly be bridged without A. the U.S. collapsing under the watch of neo-cons (which I don’t want to happen!), or B. we once again become a strong, stable country with a powerful middle-class and no bloody foreign entanglements. No, even then, the people on the far right would never admit they might be wrong and will continue to criticize and complain about socialism and we’re not doing enough to kill our enemies.

How will this possibly end?

An interview recently released (but recorded a year ago) with writer and technoculture critic Cory Doctorow, on Reality Break podcast, has what I think is a brilliant observation about the subjectivity of contemporary issues and the concept of “the Singularity” specifically:

Science fiction is about reflecting the present not the future, so, all science fiction writers predect the present and that means they write in the style and the form of the day. And you know I think the “Singularity” right now reflects a sort of social anxiety about technical people who are slipping. You know, it’s kind of like an après moi le déluge. You know, “once Vernor Vinge can’t keep up with technological progress, technical progress will no longer be keep-upable with.” And I think there’s something to that, I think there’s this feeling that when you transition from being a bright young turk to grumpy old fart that what’s changed is the world and not you, and that the world has changed in a way that is truly wrong. My friend Jim Griffon says that “If it’s been invented before you were eighteen then you assume it’s always been there, if it’s invented before you’re thirty you assume it’s the best thing ever made, if it’s invented after you’re thirty you assume that it should be illegal.”

(He also has some great discussion on why social networking software is so addictive and how absurd end user license agreements (EULAs) are by forcing us to assume a contract by our behavior–for example, those rediculous stickers on software CD envelopes (or the notices sometimes inside the envelope) that state “by opening this envelope you agree to….”)

Anyway, I find this comment about the nostalgia for the past and the fear of the future intriguing since I’ve been spending a lot of time the last year researching the “death of science fiction” (or rather, its absorption into all genre) and having spent many brain cycles on this concept of the Singularity. It’s an idea put forward by author and scientist Vinge that posthuman technology is advancing in such a way that when humans today would be incapable to perceiving or understanding the “human” of the future, humanity will have passed through the Singularity and modern human history will be at an end. This event could be when artificial intelligence has overtaken homo-sapien and we have been relegated to a “lesser” species, or when homo-sapiens have fundamentally changed via genetic manipulation and cyber enhancement.

It’s an idea that’s gaining a lot of ground both in sf and in technoculture–but one has to wonder, does putting such a connotatively fatal demarcation seperating the two not imply fear of the advancement?

I really need to keep writing this weekend (OMG! I just touchtyped that last sentence! And most of this sentence! This is a big deal for me. I’ve been using a keyboard, sometimes 10+ hours a day, for 25 years, and I still can’t touchtype. Anywa….) so this should be reasonably brief.

A couple of communities have taken very different approaches to the threat of crime in their community. (Before I get started, I’m comparing apples to crabapples here as the threat of crime are two different types for the communities. Regardless, I think the differences in approaches are far reaching and grander than the specifics of what they’re trying to protect themselves against.)

A town in Arkansas, plagued by a criminal culture of drugs and shootings, has allowed its law enforcement to place the town under martial law:

• Crime-ridden Arkansas town expands 24-hour curfew

“Curfew” is a rather quaint term for what’s going on there. The police, with automatic assault rifles, are stopping anyone from being on the streets after curfew. Their attitude it clear:

“As far as I’m concerned, at 3 o’clock in the morning, nobody has any business being on the street, except the law,” Councilman Eugene “Red” Johnson said. “Anyone out at 3 o’clock shouldn’t be out on the street, unless you’re going to the hospital.”

It seems to be the opinion of the town’s “leaders” that free citizens don’t have the liberty to be out on their own business in their town when they wish. His belief that everyone should be resting snug in their beds at night else you’re a ne’er-do-well is being imposed by force upon free citizens.

Of course, as all things are, the issue is complicated. There’s no doubt that their town is overrun by crime. Randoms shootings, drive-bys, drugs rampant. In a very significant way I feel for this town. There’s a part of me that thinks in order to deal with an out of control crime wave, the fascist fist of martial law is needed to stem the tide so that more democratic means can be allowed to have an effect. Martial law is an addressing of a symptom–crime come from failures in the social structure and no amount of fascist strength will solve the problems of social distress.

I don’t completely disagree with a limited and controled use of strength to get a situation under control, but that’s not what appears to be happening in this town (I’ve never even visited and know nothing about aside from news articles). It would seem the law of the land has an attitude that armed enforcement of curfew is not a limited and should not be a limited solution but rather a norm. When you have community leaders making statements that no one should be out on the streets late at night, you have a truly fascist attitude which seeks to control the populace and not help it to live with liberty and freedom. This town may push the criminal element to other neighboring towns, but they will not solve the underlying issues this way and will in fact end up do more harm to the very concepts of what it means to live in America.

In the curfew area, those inside the homes in the watch area peered out of door cracks Tuesday as police cruisers passed. They closed the doors afterward.

That sounds like an establishing shot from a movie set in East Germany or the Soviet Union, maybe a movie version of 1984.

Meanwhile, to protect their school children from what they see as a rising tide of school shootings, a Texas school district will be allowing its teacher to carry concealed handguns:

• Texas district will let teachers carry guns

“Gun free zones” are basically game preserves for anyone who has enough disdain for law as to want to shoot people and are going to ignore “gun free zone” declarations in order to do it. A look at school shootings the last couple of decades and you see pretty much two scenarios playing out: 1. A shooter enters a school and starts killing and wounding unprotected people until they decide when to stop, and then they kill themselves. Police arrive after it’s all done. 2. Someone (a student and/or teacher) runs to their car, grabs their gun, and comes back to stop the shooter thus ending the spree earlier than the shooter would have decided to. Police arrive after it’s all done. (Same goes with the recent church shootings.)

Unless a school is placed next door to a police station, it can take several minutes for police to respond to a shooting (which even in this age of cell phones, may not even be placed until a couple of minutes into the event), and then it can take longer for the police to make an organized counter “attack” on the shooter. And as we’ve seen, it doesn’t take very long for a shooter to exhaust their ammo and turn a final shot on themselves.

The idea of a “liberal media” is absurd, except when it comes to issues of successful non-police use of guns to protect innocent people, then the media is generally silent on reporting it:

• When killers meet armed resistance
• A quick index to our articles on guns, gun control and gun free zones.

(Although, as you can see, CNN.com appears to be doing a fair piece on this Texas town–kudos to them)

The important thing is that the school district is being smart about it. When rabid liberals hear the idea of letting teachers or students carry firearms on a campus, they immediately commit reductio ad absurdum and imagine a wild west shootout left and right. The district will be requiring very specific and strict guidelines for who can carry:

For employees to carry a pistol, they must have a Texas license to carry a concealed handgun, must be authorized to carry by the district, must receive training in crisis management and hostile situations and must use ammunition designed to minimize the risk of ricocheting bullets.

(OK, so this isn’t brief.) These are indeed two different situations that have received two different solutions, but I would like to point out the mindset and the larger repercussions of both solutions. In the Arkansas town you have a situation where the empowerment of the people has be abdicated in favor of police control. The populace have turned over their ability to take matters in their own hand, to fight to make change in their community, over to an entirely different group of armed thugs. A more organized and better funded group of thugs, perhaps. The free citizens have given up their freedom and have chosen to live under siege. Safe, perhaps, but disempowered and cowering to a different force that’s become even more uncontrollable than the criminal element.

On the other hand, the Texas town is determined to take matters into their own hands and protect their own themselves. They have recognized the absurdity of both fascist control and posting warning signs that have all the effect of “Nuh uh, mister baddie-bad. You can’t bring your guns in here to express your sociopathic suicide rage–this is a ‘gun free zone!’” Instead of relying on the near-impossible protection of the police, they have chosen a course of action that empowers themselves and not only does not eliminate freedom but rather express and celebrates it.

It’s this exact difference in attitudes which can be extrapolated into the bigger context of our reaction to terrahism. Our government has decided to take the attitude of the Arkansas town and enact police state tactics. It has decided the best way to protect the land of the free against those who despise our freedom and liberty, is to remove freedom and liberty. To paraphrase Penn Jillette, the first act our government should have done after 9/11 was to remove laws, not make more restricting our freedoms. The best attack against fundamentalism is to increase freedom and liberty and not do their job for them.

And the tragic thing is that we the people are letting it happen. We’re peeking out the crack of our doors and closing them tight as the law drives by in the middle of the night. We imagine we’re nice and safe, but unlike the “safety” of the Arkansas town, our safety is completely illusionary. Time and time and time again it’s pointed up how worthless the TSA security is in anything except controlling the innocent. How worthless the border controls are at anything except controlling in innocent. How worthless port inspections are, shipping truck control is. We’re living under increasingly fascist state control without the benefit of the safety we’re supposedly being sold in exchange for our civil liberties.

I’m a huge Nine Inch Nails fan. I think Trent Reznor is a brilliant musician and a savvy marketer and electronic music guru. From Nine Inch Nails one can draw lines of influence to bands and performers like Filter and Tweaker and Marilyn Manson (as Reznor had something more than a minor direct influence on each of them). His mixture of sonic dissonance and noise with sublime melody and often poetically emotional lyrics and a powerful and compelling voice… amazing.

Anyway, a couple of years ago he released a concept album (previewed online for free and setting the stage for the appropriately modern and technology aware marketing of the later Ghosts albums) entitled Year Zero which looks at a world several years in the future should the current neo-con trends in politics continue. Politically charged without being so pedestrian as to refer to any actual people or events and thus forever dating itself, the message of the album is clear if subtle, and the music is varied and strong.

But one of the best things about the album was its marketing. Its release was preceded by alternate reality game type elements including Web sites which extend the story of the album, “lost” USB keys with music found in various venues, etc. I love ARGs and what they’re capable of (although fascinating, the Year Zero ARG wasn’t very huge or intricate like Halo 2’s “I Love Bees” and A.I.’s “Beast” games).

Anyway, all that said, a limited length series based on the story of Year Zero may be in the works!

• Trent Reznor Is HBO’s Great Scifi Hope?

Glee!

Joe E. Holman over at Debunking Christianity has a great post today in which he contemplates the purpose of hell and what sense there is in the Christian God torturing his children for eternity if there’s no rehabilitation implied:

• What Would Jesus Do…in Hell???

So, I want to know: what does God want us to do in Hell, amidst those agonizing moments of regret and reflective thought? Amongst those endless feelings of everlasting contempt, what does God have to say to us then? When we can force back the pain of damnation long enough to think coherently, what does Jesus want us to think about? What should we do when there is no redemption, no hope, and not a drop of mercy to be found? What do we do when we’ve blown our last chance? Could a perfectly just God “run out” of mercy and have a “last chance”? If Jesus was in our lost condition, suffering eternal retribution, what would he do?

This news item:

• Man whose US immigration notice was sent to the wrong address is detained with untreated spinal cancer until he dies, denied access to his wife and children

I have no comment of my own that could add to the story itself. I’ll just post what some others have said:

OM:

…You know, one day everyone’s going to finally get tired of hire-a-cops, and it’ll be *them* put up against the wall before the lawyers.

Bastards.

Victor Trac:

The terrorists win again. I bet they didn’t expect to be /this/ successful when planning 9/11.

FLUP:

Yet another reason never to go to the US: after they copy the contents of my laptop and phone, they post a letter to the wrong address, lock me up and watch me die.

K2R:

> he no longer received painkillers,
> because he could not stand in line to collect them.

This sounds like one of the pervert things my Grandparent’s generation did in Germany.

“Of course you can have painkillers, just line up there! You can’t walk anymore? Well, I’m afraid, you will have to pick up you medication yourself, it’s the law.”

This is exactly the inhumanity small people in Germany showed while hiding behind buerocracy.

I cannot imagine how desperate he was, being stuck in the bad dream of Kafka the US has become, always hoping to wake up.

“Oceana” is a reference to the setting of George Orwell’s 1984, which is what the U.S./British empire has become. Where Big Brother monitors and watches and tracks everyone.

“London” is a reference to…modern day London, which has careened full throttle toward Orwell’s hellscape of 1984 by, as Cory Doctorow puts it, installing a “CCTV camera for every three blood cells.” Ironically, the late Orwell’s old neighborhood is covered with CCTV cameras.

The latest relevant news? It seems New York is going to turn New York City into a mirror of London, taking the first step of tracking all license plates that enter and leave Manhattan:

• NYPD’s ‘Operation Sentinel’ To Track EVERYTHING

Security expert “sherri” posted to her blog her adventures of flying home without identification:

• Flying Without a Wallet

See, the official policy of the TSA and DHS, is if a person refuses to show ID, they will be refused admittance to the gates, no matter whether they have a boarding pass or not. But, if a person forgets or loses their ID, oh well then after a few questions and a phone call, off you go! Sherri describes how amazingly easy it is to get through security without ID and how it can be even easier to circumvent security altogether–proving security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier’s point: “I don’t think any further proof is needed that the ID requirement has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with control.”

Sherri makes a comment that is accurate and pertinent to both the TSA “security” as well as NYC’s Operation Sentinel and any other program which strives to track, monitor, and watch people:

It’s important for private citizens to be able to travel without being tracked if they wish. I am not a criminal. I just don’t believe it’s anybody’s business where I go. I understand the need for ensuring the safety of our transportation infrastructure, and as such, searching passengers before boarding makes sense.
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The freedom to travel anonymously also underlies our right to peacefully assemble. When a government tracks its citizens and can arbitrarily decide to limit or cut off travel, that threatens our democracy. This is especially true in our global society, where many people rely on air travel, trains and the highway just to see their families.
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TSA’s new policy, which is to focus on finding “dangerous people” rather than objects, poses enormous challenges. It requires that the agency make sweeping judgments about travelers with very little information, and in a very short amount of time. It is simply not feasible to accomplish this accurately.
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We need to make sure our airports are safe, but at the same time, we have to be very careful not to destroy the very thing we are trying to protect: our free country.

(Emphasis mine.)

Yesterday I posted a super-bloated overlong post: The failure of conservatism. (That’s what happens when I allow myself to write unedited in stream-of-consciousness–which is every time, really.) I railed against the ideas of free market capitalism and libertarian, objectivist anarchy in the modern world. I briefly mentioned public education as part of “the commons,” a service that everyone in a society benefits from either directly or indirectly, and it gets privatized at the risk of harming society.

Well, today, “carr2d2″ on the SkepChick blog posted an article that addresses that very topic:

• Whose freedom?

She reasonably questions the libertarian belief that parents should totally determine the way, why, how, and when a child is educated. carr2d2 asks:

We were looking at the children’s education as a function of the parents’ freedom.  At what point does a parent’s right to raise their child as they see fit (or, as some argue, their freedom to not pay taxes) infringe upon that child’s right to live a healthy life, relatively untainted by abuse?  Don’t we owe it to all our kids to give them as equal a shot as is possible at success?

This topic spawned a great comment thread with wonderful observation like this snippet from AgnosticOracle:

If we look at periods and places where there was no public education the vast majority of working class people didn’t get educated. It isn’t merely a question of fairness to the child. There are externalities of education that benefit society as a whole. Carl Sagan’s father was a garment worker. Without public education there is a good chance the world would have lost out on his genius.
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It is a benefit not only to the child but to society at large to educate children well. This is especially true if you want a functioning democracy. While we may wish to give the parents the right to teach the child what they want, we shouldn’t give them the right to deny them education. For instance, a parent shouldn’t be able to choose not to teach their daughters math and science.

He, and most commentors, have it exactly right. A parent isn’t imbued with special wisdom simply because they can procreate. They certainly have a wide range of rights along with their responsibilities, but the minimal education of the people who are going to be participating in society is everyone’s concern–not just the parents. The libertarian mindset, like I implied in yesterday’s post, was perfectly reasonable when people can and did live in a such a way as to not have to interact or participate in society at large. but we, as Americans and a human race, have developed far beyond any reasonable concept of isolationism and selfish individualism.

The education of my children directly affects your and your childrens’ lives–you want to be assured that my kids have a certain basic level of education, no? In a libertarian paradise, there’s no guarantee that anyone you interact with doesn’t have a skewed and flawed education, if any. Would you want to live in that kind of wild west in an age in which our health and lives and lifestyle is so delicately balanced on a web of dynamic social interactivity?

Animal Farm revisited:

There’s a chain email that’s being passed around conservative emailers that tells a story of a foreign freedom fighter describing to his American college professor how to capture wild pigs by feeding them free corn and slowly penning them in. The email ends with a quote: “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.” attributed to Thomas Jefferson. One problem is that according to Jeffersonian researchers, Jefferson never said that. Republican President Gerald Ford did. Although, as a big fan of Jefferson, I wouldn’t have put it past him to have said it! Jefferson was no fan of big government, absolutely believed that the right to bear arms was so the people could change government by force should politics fail, and even believed all debts and laws and Constitutions should be eliminated every fourteen years and recreated based on the norms and needs of the new generation. The other problem with that quote…I half agree with it despite the fact I also think it’s absurd.

The root of the entire problem is that we live in an extremely complex and complicated world, but we’re creatures that abhor complexity and demand simple answers. I’m no different. For the last four years I’ve been investigating ways I could define myself in the simplest terms: libertarian, anarchist, socialist, collectivist, some combinations thereof. And the conclusion I constantly confront is there are no simple answers.

This also shows the flaw in that very simple, easy to understand metaphor of the pigs. The reason the pigs can be easily penned in and trapped is not because of the free food, but because they’re pigs and the story’s antagonists are humans. If the humans in the story didn’t use free food and gates, they’d use snares. Or guns or tranq’ or traps or any of a hundred methods because the story is comparing simple hungry pigs to clever and technological humans. The story as an analogy is completely absurd and illustrates nothing analogous to our situation or conditions.

The irony of small, powerful government:

So, let’s take a closer look at that quote since that’s the part that really applies to anything realistic: Read the rest of this entry »

(Vital Update: Check out my comment at the bottom for some very important info on this post.)

OK, remember that post I wrote not long ago: On the issue of privacy and protecting civil liberties? That got reprinted by Steganos security software site? (”Sheesh, you never freakin’ let us forget!”) Seems I have some people much smarter than me to support my claim that everyone should be using encryption in their ordinary, day-to-day lives:

• Encryption, Privacy, and You

Written by “Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer,” his article very succinctly explains how in this police state of the free and fascism of the brave (my words, not his) the best defense is to make encryption ubiquitous and not hidden:

The solution to this is to make encryption much more common, so that it’s no longer so rare that it raises a flag. In the novel, Cory wimped out, and had his protagonist’s best friend be the chief programmer at the most popular ISP in the city, and had them change the ISPs code in a way that transparently made everyone’s computers encrypt all of the traffic going onto the network. In real life, it’s not so easy. Technosavvy folks can’t wave a magic wand and make people start encrypting their data.
What we can do is start encrypting our data, and when we teach people to use computers, just set them up so that they’re using encryption. Set up your parents macintosh to use FileVault. Set up your windows box to use an encrypted filesystem. Use PGP. Put passwords on your important documents. Just make the little bit of effort to use reasonable encryption on a routine basis.

Remember that this article is in response to the fact that the DHS at the U.S. borders is actively seizing laptops, cell phones, USB keys, digital cameras, to have the data copied and analyzed and stored–without warrant or even probable causes or reasonable suspicion! (In gross and crass violation of the 4th Amendment, yet until the case gets to the Supreme Court, the government’s going to keep doing it). But that’s not even close to the limit, it’s barely the beginning.

Check out this video in which Stanford Law professor and technology critic, Lawrence Lessig, describes the coming “i-Patriot Act”:

(Source: Silicon Valley Watcher article. Full video here.)

One concern about the thought of having your laptop encrypted, and seized, is that when you’re “asked” for your access password, if you refuse you’ll be arrested. Technically, that’s not a concern although in reality it may be:

While the non-suspicion-based seizing of personal data has yet to reach the Supreme Court (and that may take a while), the concept of being forced to turn over passwords to law enforcement has already been through the high courts, and the result is still confusing at best. I’m not a legal scholar by any means, but from what I can tell if the state does not know of any specific criminal files on a device, then you can rightfully refuse to provide a password under 5th Amendment protection. (Although, if they do know for a fact already that you have, say, an illegal copy of Prince’s “Let’s Get Crazy” on your computer, you may not have any protection and may be compelled to provide the password to access the file.)

In other words, if your laptop is seized at the border in a random data seizure, or even if you looked like a dirty terrahist but that’s all the “evidence” they have to take your device, you can not be compelled to provide the decryption password that would unlock your laptop. Now, can you be arrested for refusing? Technically, no. But I can bet a cop or DHS agent will easily find another five things to arrest and hold you on, even if they’re later dropped. And I can’t imagine being arrested is a fun adventure in any stretch of the imagination. So, it’s easy to see why people would be reticent to do anything that might make them stand out and cause any trouble–and that’s exactly how the state likes it! They want the people to be afraid of arrest, no matter how innocent they may be, and thus complacent with any violations of civil liberties they can think of perpetuating. All in the name of Security!

And so, that’s the point I made earlier and MarkCC makes: if data encryption were to become so common, so everyday, that 99% of those who use it have nothing more to hide than their credit card information, family photos, and chicken pot pie recipes, the DHS will be less willing to wantonly seize innocent citizen’s property at their whim, turning us all into prisoners of our own country. Will this make us less safe, not allowing the police to do whatever they like in the name of keeping us safe? I seriously doubt it. The fallacy of false positives shows that if there’s any flaw in the accuracy of those arrested and accused of crimes, (and c’mon, we all know innocent people are arrested and even convicted more than rarely) then the number of innocent people initially accused and arrested can easily be larger than those who are guilty. That’s a concept the founding fathers knew about (although more in practice as the British were arresting and convicting innocent people for any made up crime in order to maintain control and fear), and so set up our justice system to favor occasionally letting the guilty go if it meant increasing the likelihood an innocent would not be convicted.

In any case, it’s a matter of principle, so long as we want to actually live in a free country which believes in liberty:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
–Benjamin Franklin, 1755