"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The apparatus has been at work too long and has been too heavy-handed in its operations for us to just blithely pretend that it's telling us the truth. If, with all the resources and rights we've handed over to them, this is the best job they can do, then they're just not very good at it.
...why on earth wasn't 9/11 the final straw? Several orders of magnitude worse...
9/11 was a failure of imagination, on the part of the self-appointed security "experts" who told us we should obey without question terrorists' every command, and oh by the way we should leave the cockpit door unlocked because the pilot might have a heart attack and then some M$ Flight Simulator enthusiast could save the day if you happened to be flying to that one airport by the shore of Lake Michigan and also the weather happened to be very pixelated at the time. I scarcely have to point out that the "experts" were quite wrong. "Another 9/11" wouldn't happen today, because we Americans know in our heads what we always knew in our hearts: when some foreign goat enthusiast threatens you with a knife, you pound the shit out of him. You don't wait for the gub'ment to send help. I mean, they might send the ATF or something.
On the other hand, when the Russian FSB calls to identify a known terrorist living in Cambridge Mass, it would be nice if somebody picked up the phone.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The apparatus has been at work too long and has been too heavy-handed in its operations for us to just blithely pretend that it's telling us the truth. If, with all the resources and rights we've handed over to them, this is the best job they can do, then they're just not very good at it.
...why on earth wasn't 9/11 the final straw? Several orders of magnitude worse...
9/11 was a failure of imagination, on the part of the self-appointed security "experts" who told us we should obey without question terrorists' every command, and oh by the way we should leave the cockpit door unlocked because the pilot might have a heart attack and then some M$ Flight Simulator enthusiast could save the day if you happened to be flying to that one airport by the shore of Lake Michigan and also the weather happened to be very pixelated at the time. I scarcely have to point out that the "experts" were quite wrong. "Another 9/11" wouldn't happen today, because we Americans know in our heads what we always knew in our hearts: when some foreign goat enthusiast threatens you with a knife, you pound the shit out of him. You don't wait for the gub'ment to send help. I mean, they might send the ATF or something.
On the other hand, when the Russian FSB calls to identify a known terrorist living in Cambridge Mass, it would be nice if somebody picked up the phone.