James Galvin

I’ve been subscribed to the security expert Bruce Schneier’s blog for a long time now. He has always urged people to refuse to be terrorised, as he collected stories about a paranoid society that sends the SWAT team after Indian poetry professors for recycling paper, and can’t tell a bomb from a tape dispenser.

Today, he has aggregated these bits and pieces into an article entitled The War on the Unexpected:

We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

The article is both entertaining and disturbing, and with each ridiculous scenario he references, Bruce highlights a worrying trend which cannot be averted without some unlikely policy changes by administration officials. Cue a lot of angry comments from people who didn’t get it.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 22:35 pm and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.