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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

...But as you can see, Senator, there is also no evidence of the guaranteed absence of terrorist plots either. They are obviously even better hidden than we feared. Increased resources will be required to bring them to light. Our department has drafted a new budget proposal that takes this changed situation into account.

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Let's be honest -- if they really wanted more funding, it'd be much easier just to fake some threats to warrant more public support, Operation Northwoods style --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

Thanks for the link. People somehow don't realize that no one was punished by losing job/savings/reputation/credibility for even proposing such a sabotage. Kennedy merely "rejected" proposal which gives his office zero credibility on how he handled possible similar proposals. In the governments incentives are all inverted: bad stuff is not risky to attempt and it gives great rewards.

"Following presentation of the Northwoods plan, Kennedy removed Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, although he became Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in January 1963"

Such a brutal punishment, indeed. A guy makes a plan to kill citizens and he's just moved to another office to continue earn money extracted from these citizens.

You argued no-one was punished by losing their job. That's exactly what happened. Whether that is an appropriate punishment is a different discussion.

It was not a punishment. The guy was getting free goodies from his powerful position somewhere in the government. He proposed to kill people. He got another position with free goodies somewhere in the government.

Especially since, Senator, the new facility to be built and staffed for the purpose of identifying these better-hidden terrorists, will be built in your district!

And, Senator, if you don't support this program and, heaven forbid, another terror attack occurs that could have been prevented by the program, then your career will be over.

"...though somewhere between 30 and 45% of the contract cost will go to cover the administration and management of this contract, by employees in the greater Washington DC area..."

Ah you see, no terrorist plots actually means that our tiger^Wterrorist repellent rock is working!

Exactly. Why can't we just pull their meta-data profiles from online, and just assess potential threat levels and weight it against the national threat level.

Threat level orange? Internet Anarchists and Armchair Libertarians don't fly.

Threat level blue? Just people who look like they have some desert heritage.

Threat level red? "I'm sorry sir. It says here you we're really, really mad at how a cop stopped you last weekend for going through a red light."

You know they are already doing this right? American intels are collecting individuals profile here and outside of US. This is the whole PRISM project.

And this is what people oppose too. Now we are suggesting abandon TSA and instead favor massive profiling? You will return to karma 0 if that's the route you take. Hahaha

sorry, let me add: /sarcasm.

I hear ya. I'm just being a realist. If I was dictator of the world, I'd ban all taxes and let the market figure it out.

If I were a dictator, I'd just migrate to Mars!

and yeah I know it was a sarcasm (hence the hahaha at the end)

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