My personal opinion about the weeks and months leading up to 9/11 is that the neocon Bush Administration wanted it to happen. That is not the same as orchestrating it, but they quashed certain investigations at certain times, made it hard for intelligence agencies and the FBI to do their jobs, etc. They did this because the "peace dividend" would have been upon us and they needed a new enemy to fight. There is too much money in military and security contracts to ever let the US actually wind down the machine. Or maybe they did it because the nation was on the cusp of a financial collapse due to the "dot com" collapse that was taking place. Either way, the reasons were economic.
For every privacy invading technology you see, I will show you a company that lobbied for it to exist. You want examples? Level III systems and those idiotic naked body scanners at the airports. The Real ID Act is another--nothing wrong with most state issued driver's licenses, they just weren't expensive enough.
If you want to be free then you have to accept certain dangers in life. It's not like the tech put in place is doing anything to make you safer, anyways--it's only purpose is to suck billions of dollars out of taxpayers and concentrate that wealth in the hands of those who know how to go out and force it in their direction. When we inevitably suffer more attacks, it's all "we did our best."
I hold out very little hope for any of this to change, but we as citizens need to keep resisting anyways. Gut some government agencies, cut the budgets, stop the revolving door of lobbyists.
For every privacy invading technology you see, I will show you a company that lobbied for it to exist. You want examples? Level III systems and those idiotic naked body scanners at the airports. The Real ID Act is another--nothing wrong with most state issued driver's licenses, they just weren't expensive enough.
If you want to be free then you have to accept certain dangers in life. It's not like the tech put in place is doing anything to make you safer, anyways--it's only purpose is to suck billions of dollars out of taxpayers and concentrate that wealth in the hands of those who know how to go out and force it in their direction. When we inevitably suffer more attacks, it's all "we did our best."
I hold out very little hope for any of this to change, but we as citizens need to keep resisting anyways. Gut some government agencies, cut the budgets, stop the revolving door of lobbyists.