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Room 641A

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Re: Room 641A

#21

Post by nater5000 »

stackghost wrote: post #17
Cider9986 wrote: post #5

9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.

It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count. Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube. Don't forg…

>then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris

Not that it really matters to your point, but this happened in 2015. Seems kind of odd to include that in this list.

Re: Room 641A

#22

Post by nabbed »

krapp wrote: post #8
EvanAnderson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away. I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based cap…

Y2K was potentially a real problem. It didn't materialize as such because we actually fixed it.

Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.

Re: Room 641A

#24

Post by qmr »

Cider9986 wrote: post #5

9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.

They died from car crashes.

Not accidents.

Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.

Re: Room 641A

#25

Post by lern_too_spel »

margalabargala wrote: post #19
Levitating wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.

Right, so we would expect the magnitude of the changes from 9/11 to be about 1/14th the magnitude of the changes we do to prevent car deaths.

We have a whole licensing apparatus and traffic policing as well as safety regulations for vehicles driven on public roads. It's not cheap.

Re: Room 641A

#26

Post by tedd4u »

Covered many times before.

How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt] (https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc...) 710 points | the-mitr | 4 months ago | 254 comments

Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 333 points | hourislate | 6 years ago | 70 comments

Room 641A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 248 points | llambda | 13 years ago | 44 comments

Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 207 points | mimsee | 10 years ago | 75 comments

Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 51 points | jihadjihad | 2 years ago | 5 comments

Re: Room 641A

#27

Post by wavemode »

Cider9986 wrote: post #5

9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.

Mass surveillance has certainly gone too far, but comparing 3000 premeditated murders to car accidents is not really a logical way to argue that. We investigate murder for a reason, despite it being a much rarer cause of death than natural causes and accidents.

Re: Room 641A

#28

Post by skipants »

qmr wrote: post #24
Cider9986 wrote: post #5

9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.

They died from car crashes. Not accidents. Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.

> Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.

Is it? The person you responded to sees car crashes as an important issue to solve yet still calls it "car accidents". So maybe it's not that important after all.

Nothing makes me saltier than language policing; I'd say fixing _that_ broken language is more of a step towards fixing issues than the actual language itself.

Re: Room 641A

#29

Post by skipants »

Cider9986 wrote: post #5

9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.

The sentiment here seems pretty anti-surveillance -- but why the false dichotomy? Both are important issues. It just comes off as demeaning to the people that died in 9/11.

So much vitriol here today, jeez.

Re: Room 641A

#30

Post by EvanAnderson »

bee_rider wrote: post #16
EvanAnderson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away. I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based cap…

I mean, given recent voting patterns, people currently in their 30’s probably won’t be elected until like 2060, right?

The US tendency toward gerontocracy is frustrating to me. Besides being out-of-touch, our federal officeholders being so old, as a group, feeds a self-fulfilling stereotype.
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