End the War on Freedom

Other than supporting The Bill of Rights, does anything constitute treason in this country any more? -- Minority Mike

Chip Elliott at KeepAndBearArms.com - Letter from an ANGRY Reader - a 1981 letter to Esquire magazine about one middle-aged couples' discovery that being armed is a necessary part of life. At least as relevant today as it was twenty years ago. [kaba]

On the eighteenth or nineteenth of December, my wife was at a meeting, everybody else was busy doing something, and I walked alone to the Venice Sidewalk Cafe for some dinner. It occurred to me that it was silly to put on a shoulder holster just to go out for a beer and a sandwich, but I did it anyway, although I had never been threatened physically, ever, except in foreign countries.

Walking home about six-thirty at night, just off the corner of West Washington Boulevard and Westminster Avenue, I was confronted by five young, well- dressed uptown brothers. Black. Okay. Let's get that right out front. They could just as easily have been white. We were directly under a streetlight and less than fifty feet from an intersection thick with traffic.

I was not dressed as a high roller. I am not a high roller. I don't look like a robber baron or a rich dentist. I look like exactly what I am, a middle-aged guy who's seen a little more than he needs to see. I thought, what are these guys doing?

Their leader pulled a kitchen knife out of his two-hundred-dollar leather jacket. His mistake was that he wasn't close enough to me to use it, only to threaten me. He smiled at me and said, "Just the wallet, man. Won't be no trouble."

That was a very long moment for me. I remember it just as it happened. I remember thinking at the time that it was one of those moments that are supposed to be charged with electricity. It wasn't. It was hollow, silent, and chilly.

I looked at this guy and at his companions and at his knife, and I thought: I.IDon't you see how you're misreading me? I am not a victim. I used to be a victim, but now I'm not. Can't you see the difference?

I pulled the automatic, leveled it at them and said very clearly, "You must be dreaming."

The guy smiled at me and said, "Sheeeit," and his buddies laughed, and he began to move toward me with the knife. I thought, this guy is willing to kill me for thirty-five dollars. I aimed the automatic at the outer edge of his left thigh and shot him.

He dropped like a high jumper hitting the bar and yelled "Goddamn!" three times, the first one from amazement, I guess, and the second two higher pitched and from pain.

He yelled at his buddies, "Ain't you gonna do nothing?" They did do nothing.

AP via The Fort Worth Star-Telegram - Police captain suspended over Kmart arrests - good. Hope they fire him. [kaba]

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - War in Iraq, War on the Rule of Law? - Dr. Paul believes that Congress would support a war with Iraq, but insists that they make an official declaration, as required by the constitution, before GW sends our young men and women into harm's way.

The chorus of voices calling for the United States to attack Iraq grows louder. Recent weeks had seen growing controversy concerning the wisdom of such an attack, including controversy over the need for congressional approval for an invasion. The war hawk TV pundits have been busy working to quell the controversy by insisting the President has complete authority to wage war without congressional involvement.

The crux of their remarks is that we should not question whether the U.S. will go to war with Iraq, but only how and when the war should waged.

Yet whether to invade Iraq is precisely the question, and only Congress can answer it. The Constitution grants Congress the sole authority to declare war. The President cannot wage war legally without a congressional declaration. His status as commander-in-chief gives him authority only to execute war, not initiate it. The law in Article I, section 8, is quite clear. The undeclared wars of the 20th century may provide precedent for unilateral action by the President, but it is an illegal precedent.

Dave Polaschek at Dave's Picks - Intellectual Property - Dave gives his opinion of H.R.5211 and copyright in general. [picks]

Charles C. Mann at The Atlantic - Homeland Insecurity - a long visit with Bruce Schneier explaining in detail why technology cannot solve any security problem. It takes people, lots of well-trained people, and systems that fail well. [grabbe]

The distinction between ductile and brittle security dates back, Schneier has argued, to the nineteenth-century linguist and cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs, who set down what is now known as Kerckhoffs's principle. In good crypto systems, Kerckhoffs wrote, "the system should not depend on secrecy, and it should be able to fall into the enemy's hands without disadvantage." In other words, it should permit people to keep messages secret even if outsiders find out exactly how the encryption algorithm works.

At first blush this idea seems ludicrous. But contemporary cryptography follows Kerckhoffs's principle closely. The algorithms--the scrambling methods--are openly revealed; the only secret is the key. Indeed, Schneier says, Kerckhoffs's principle applies beyond codes and ciphers to security systems in general: every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime cause of brittleness--and therefore something likely to make a system prone to catastrophic collapse. Conversely, openness provides ductility.

...

Few of the new airport-security proposals address this problem. Instead, Schneier told me in Los Angeles, they address problems that don't exist. "The idea that to stop bombings cars have to park three hundred feet away from the terminal, but meanwhile they can drop off passengers right up front like they always have ..." He laughed. "The only ideas I've heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and getting the passengers to fight back." Both measures test well against Kerckhoffs's principle: knowing ahead of time that law- abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en masse, for example, doesn't help hijackers to fend off their assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.

...

"The trick is to remember that technology can't save you," Schneier says. "We know this in our own lives. We realize that there's no magic anti-burglary dust we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don't offer much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people."

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