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Yep, no updates for a week, I know I know.
Ok, this is getting scary. No, not the terrorist attacks or the threat of war,
but the way American society, government, and corporations are reacting to this
tradegy. The WTC event is being used to lead us down the slippery slope of our
rights and liberties being taken away. Censorship is running rampent in the name
of "protection" and soon all kinds of privacy violations (reading emails,
monitoring phone calls, intercepting mail) will become commonplace in the name
of safety. The latest
incident, Clear Channel (the monopolistic radio company) had declared a list of songs banned from
playing because of questionable lyrics. Wired has some more info on that.
Cartoon Network has already stopped showing some cartoons or episodes of
cartoons because of either violent content or showing some buildings in New York
being destroyed. Do we really want to live like this forever?
Richard Stallman has also written a great essay on how these events could lead to our civil liberties being taken away. Already Congress is clamoring for encryption backdoors in software so that the government can read whatever it wants to. Slashdot also has a great piece on what you can do to help save what little "Rights Online" we have left before they're all taken away. Congress reconvenes on September 21, so hurry and write those emails and make those phone calls to your represenatives. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also has some sample letters that you can base your's off of. Wired has another article asking if civil liberty is the next casualty in this great tradegy.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for finding those responsible and trying to prevent future acts like this from happening. But I don't want my country to become a police state in order to achieve this.
In other related news, ZDNet and Wired have some great stuff on how the web really came through with the new form of media by amatures. The web has also allowed people to put up hundreds of pictures and first person accounts that one would normally never get to see or hear through normal media channels. Online donations are also soaring to record levels. Slashdot was key in how I got a lot of my information and pictures, and was actually how I first heard about it since it's my homepage.
Some more various links: newspaper
headlines, engineering analysis of why the towers collapsed, a very large pictures of
the dust, and a radar picture of the NYC area. (Unfortunatly those last two
pictures are no longer up)
This attack has also affected even things like The Onion which is rerunning past
editions in light of the tradegy. It'll be interesting to see how they
handle the attacks, as they satire just about everything, even the Columbine
shootings. Course the way I always deal with stuff like this is to laugh at
it, so the sooner they get back up to speed the better in my humble
opinion.
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