Victory for Terrorism

Even if you set aside the direct consequences of the War on Terror like unconstitutional searches of subway riders, millions of dollars to supplying rural townships with Haz-Mat suits and NSA eavesdropping of American phone conversations, I think you can plausibly argue that the costs have far outweighed the benefits.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Circuit Court Judge Lynn Egan agreed with the city that posting such information posed a threat to homeland security. Egan also turned down attorney Daniel Biederman's request for more 911 phone logs.

Biederman represents the families who lost a total of four children in a 2004 house fire. He sought a year's worth of records intending to demonstrate failures in the city's 911 system, such as understaffing and unanswered calls. Biederman then posted pieces of the information on his Web site, www.911failure.com.

You can come up with a justification for how anything that the government does effects homeland security. Now American citizens aren’t even allowed to find out how (in)effective the services they pay for are because some nutjob might be able to exploit it.

We have chosen to allocate our hard-earned salaries to provide for the common good, if we aren’t allowed to criticize those programs or, indeed, even discover how well those programs are functioning then we have no choice but to trust the self-serviing bureaucrats are telling us. Trust us. Everything is fine, but we need more money and you need less privacy.

If this is what we are forced to settle for the terrorists have surely succeeded in destroying the American way of life.