Senator calls for the Anarchist Cookbook to be “removed from the Internet” | Hacker News Reader

Senator calls for the Anarchist Cookbook to be “removed from the Internet”

arstechnica.com

7 pointskeithly8 comments

I'd really rather if the people in our government were mature enough to understand that death is the inevitable result of being alive, and it is futile to trade our civil liberties to attempt a 100% survival rate. I'm much more worried about our government suspecting I'm a consumer of CP because I use Tor than I am that angry extremists will lash out at me. A dispassionate appraisal of the facts reveals the first to be far more likely.

"I'd really rather if the people in our government were mature enough to understand that death is the inevitable result of being alive, and it is futile to trade our civil liberties to attempt a 100% survival rate."

You suppose that they don't know that. You suppose that their motives are to improve your survival rate, ie to protect you. You suppose they are uninformed, erroneous, lack historical knowledge and sophistication. That they are basically unknowledgeable, and uninformed. That they opt for (unattainable) perfection, destroying unwillingly freedom in the process. Basically, you assume they are "stupid".

That's, (without you wanting it,) arrogant on your part. "They don't know/understand". You don't give enough credit to the enemy. Things get much clearer, all over the place, if you suppose instead that the people in charge are NOT actually "immature", "stupid", "uninformed", but instead that they target your civil liberties in the first place, for personal and their sponsors' gain, and that caring about you and me, are just convenient excuses.

I think there are a lot of people in our government who fit that description. I don't believe that explanation makes sense in this particular instance.

Keep in mind that Feinstein has witnessed political violence firsthand: she was the first into Harvey Milk's office after his assassination[1]. Her views on the Constitutionality of all tools of violence are understandably less permissive than most people.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone–Milk_assassinations

The FBI is getting really good at catching people involved in FBI plots.

She will have a tough time retroactively removing the copy I and presumably thousands of other people downloaded from ftp.spies.com in 1995. At least two decades too late, Dianne.

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who "doesn't understand how the Internet works." Nor does she understand the Constitution.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

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