It's easy and fun to talk about these things. Outrage comes easily. How dare they take our rights. Ashcroft is bringing on a police state. Et al.

As a criminal myself, I have more personal respect for Ashcroft than I do for most EFF-style reactionaries. It's easy to talk and whine and leaflet and be angry. Ashcroft is making change. Maybe it will hurt me. Maybe it will hurt us. Maybe it'll hurt our country. But he's not a second hander. He's not spinning his wheels in the mud.

Talking about your rights will not preserve them indefinitely. If you want to keep them, you have to be prepared to make them harder to strip and easier to enforce. This is a whole lot more complicated than coffeehouse pseudointellectualism.

It's hard to act on your own. Most of the protest I see over these things is just another form of mob mentality. But it's on our side. So it's not a mob, it's a demonstration. It's not mindless, it's enlightened.

Yeah.

You're background noise to the people crafting homeland security policy. Someone's always gonna be righteously outraged. They don't care.

If you want to defend the things you feel are valuable, it's going to take more than rightious indignation.

It's a shame I need to say this, but confidential to SecurityFocus moderator type: this isn't an incitement to violence. This isn't an attempt to troll. This is an attempt to get people to stop and wonder whether they're signal or noise.

Be careful out there.

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