Getting On The Terrorist Watch List

After reading a report earlier this week which references various law enforcement pamphlets which detail behaviours of potential terrorists (“If you encounter any of the following, call the Joint Terrorism Task Force”), I was quite naturally inspired to look back over the body of writing I have produced during the last year or so and see how I compare to their profiling attempts. Now, taking the body of work as a whole, I think it is safe to say that I have a pretty weighty terrorist inclination. But if you look at any individual essay, I have to say I come up short. There are ones which repeatedly reference the Constitution, for example, but leave out any mention of driving being a right rather than a privilege. There are places where I state that Americans have the right to bear arms, but neglect to mention that I am essentially a loner. I know that I can do better, and I am here to prove it.

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The New Battleground: Freedom of Speech

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

—First Amendment of the Constitution

Once upon a time, our civil liberties as enumerated in the Bill of Rights were like the plumbing under the house: necessary underpinnings of our existance, but not really something to which we gave a lot of thought. If something seemed broken, we called in the “experts” and trusted them to deal with the problem appropriately, without the necessity of ever getting our own hands dirty. Then our circumstances changed. The rapid growth of the Internet, combined with the repercussions of a terrorist attack on our soil, threw many of us into a tangible awareness of our rights and the realization that if we didn’t learn a little about how to protect and maintain them ourselves we were going to wind up, well, knee deep in sewage. For the last six years, there has been increasing awareness and involvement, and looking around the web and at our own government it is clear that lines which were once nearly invisible are being etched deeply into the sand. On some level, we all know that the next battle to be fought on our soil will not be one of “us” fighting “the terrorists”. It will be us fighting for which version of ourselves we want to become. Continue reading