Declan McCullagh wrote:
> When it comes to maintaining the size of government or giving more
> money to police, there is rarely gridlock. Look at the ever-increasing
> FBI budgets, for instance.
This should be expected, actually; In the presence of strong
crypto and really good surveillence equipment (such as spy
satellites), War as such is obsolete -- it means too big a cost
in terms of infrastructure. Instead, you can get your intel
*out* of the country (using strong crypto) or *about* the country
(using surveillence equipment), learn about exact targets, and
send your operatives in. No muss, only a little fuss, and
you often wind up in control of infrastructure that you'd have
had to destroy otherwise, usually with whatever remains of
the original government acting as your puppet, er, your proxy.
Sometimes the naibs get upset and refer to your operatives as
"terrorists". Heck, sometimes that's exactly what they are.
If the best way for you to change the policy of a foreign country
to something you like better is to terrify them, then that's the
kind of operation you'll send your guys over to do.
Anyway, one of the FBI's major jobs is to keep countries and
other terrorist organizations from doing this to the USA -- as
this type of thing becomes the dominant mode of last-resort
diplomacy (as it assumes the position formerly occupied by war)
you will be seeing the army's budget decline and the FBI's
(and CIA's, and NSA's) budget get bigger.
Our problem is that the FBI cannot stop these guys in a free
country. So it will be asking for more and more resources, and
occasionally doing really silly crap like this; Carnivore is
not going to allow the FBI to catch any terrorists working for
nation states, or other dangerous organizations - those guys
have training. It will probably allow them to catch future
generations of Tim McVeigh's crowd (assuming they use the 'net
at all) but that's not nearly as important, because those
organizations have no plan or unified agenda - their actions
are merely white noise, as opposed to orchestrated campaigns
likely to accomplish any specific purpose.
The thing is, they're *pretending* that it will allow them to
catch the dangerous ones, because they're under such tremendous
pressure to produce something, anything, that will be effective
against them.
Ray
