Oh How Secure I Feel

Another beautiful headline. “Homeland Security Creates National Computer Forensics Institute” I suppose it too much to hope that we will ever be rid of this new layer of government 'rights infringement' bureaucracy that is Bin Laden's great gift to us, but I sure hate to see them moving ahead with more pretend help. Couldn't they just take their billions and go live in the South Pacific like nice little retired despots or something? I mean hackers and scammers are one thing. We know what they want, they want our money! So it is not too hard to defend ourselves from them. But Homeland Security wants our lives. They want our thoughts, our fears, our hopes, our concerns, anything at all that will help put us under their control. So in the guise of rooting out 'cyber terrorism' they are training hundreds of people and spending millions on techniques and equipment to do to us, the everyday citizen, exactly what they say they are protecting us from.

You can be quite sure that the proper name for this 'Institute' would be more along the lines of “National Computer Spying Institute”. And of course, like the CIA and the DEA, they will soon be creating their own criminals out of boredom and the need for a 'budget bounce'.

The CIA did this internationally for decades, any time you really need them you can always create a 'boogey man', but that was not a really big problem since they were technically limited to bothering foreigners.

The FBI, DEA and BATF folks have been crawling all over each other trying to increase their budget slice for quite some time too. And the only really juicy groups they could get their hands on were technically 'on our side'. It is so embarrassing to DEA when all they can catch are CIA agents and the FBI's best stuff was either government scandal or religious kooks (and those last tended to turn out badly. Oh how they must have longed for the days of the Vietnam War protest when they had all kinds of groups they expose as 'subversives' come budget time.)

The CIA lost its best boogey-man with the USSR and the DEA was catching their South American friends and the FBI was tripping all over its toes trying not to catch CIA and DEA guys and life was getting real tough for government ghost hunters.

But then came a terrorist plan that actually worked.

Now a cynic would say that it could have happened sooner but Bin Laden did not dare succeed so well until a family servant was in the White House. After all Mr. Bin Laden the Terrorist, depends on the help of his family money and that might be a bit tight if his actions actually got his family into trouble with the Great Satan. But with a loyal family servant in the White House to see that the family all got to safety and that no economic repercussions ensued, he was free to move.

However while that may have been the deciding factor for the timing, it is not all that easy to pull such a plan off. First it requires that the intelligence and policing agencies be so throughly involved in internal haggling that no one notices the elephant coming in the back door. Second it requires finding and training a bunch of men smart enough to fly a plane into a specific building or two and at the same time dumb enough to kill themselves doing it. Even in a land full of respect for ignorance and fanaticism, such as the Middle East, this is no easy proposition.

And what a fantastic boon it has been for the boogey-man dependent. Now an enemy that actually attacked us! And they threaten our SUVs and they show no signs of being civilized in their calm moments. They wear weird clothes (not like the Russians that just wore old ones) and they don't even have the same God (unlike the Russians who just tried to pretend they didn't believe in any god but mostly actually believed in ours) Perfect Boogey-men!

And the power grabbers and freedom suppressors gabbed hard and suppressed away! They rounded up and hid and tortured and warred and passed a law to make it all legal after the fact and signed orders that made it illegal to check and see if it was legal and then signed some more orders to make it legal to spy on anyone they thought might be fun to spy on and then signed orders to make checking on the legality of that illegal. What a heyday for the boogey-man's dependents!

And now that the legality of their illegality has been established they are moving the spying out of the confines of NSA and into the mainstream. The College of Domestic Spying or what did they call it....?

Oh ya! “National Computer Forensics Institute”