From: Kyle Stedman (kyle_st_at_eudoramail.com)
Date: Fri Jan 02 2004 - 20:27:30 EST
To: "Conntech" <conntech_at_stephano.libct.org> From: "Kyle Stedman" <kyle_st_at_eudoramail.com> Subject: [CONNTECH] Reckless Pursuit of Protection from Theoretical Privacy Abuse
While our ALA, in its prepubescent angst, curls its toes with the rest of the Angry Left, some dare speak
reason and truth:
[excerpt here, full link below]
There's a quiet scandal at the heart of Sept. 11; one that for different reasons neither the government nor the privacy lobby really wants to talk about. It's this: For two and a half weeks before the attacks, the U.S. government knew the names of two hijackers. It knew they were al-Qaida killers and that they were already in the United States. In fact, the two were living openly under their own names, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. They used those names for financial transactions, flight school, to earn frequent flier miles, and to procure a California identity card.
Despite this paper trail, and despite having two and a half weeks to follow the scent, the FBI couldn't locate either man—at least not until Sept. 11, when they flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. If we had found them, there is a real possibility that most or all of the hijackings would have been prevented. The two shared addresses with Mohamed Atta, who flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who flew into the South Tower. They were linked to most of the other hijackers as well. So August 2001 offered our last chance to foil the attacks. And if we want to stop the next attack, we need to know what went wrong in August 2001. Despite all the resources of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, we did not find two known terrorists living openly. How could we have failed so badly in such a simple, desperate task?
We couldn't find al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in August 2001 because we had imposed too many rules designed to protect against privacy abuses that were mainly theoretical. We missed our best chance to save the lives of 3,000 Americans because we spent more effort and imagination guarding against these theoretical privacy abuses than against terrorism.
I feel some responsibility for sending the government down that road...
Read the whole thing: http://slate.msn.com/id/2093344/
--- Kyle, Public Librarian _____________________________________ "I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush's administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs." -David Brooks, NYTimes (12/13/03) Need a new email address that people can remember Check out the new EudoraMail at http://www.eudoramail.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Conntech Listserv: To be removed from this list send "signoff conntech" in an email message to majordomo_at_lists.libct.org Listserv HyperMail archives currently not available http://mylibrary.ccsu.edu/~conntech/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Fri Jan 02 2004 - 20:16:41 EST