Just passing along a couple of quick links to articles I noticed in IHT.
How to stop radiation terrorism. Although we haven’t had any, but that’s beside the point. The authors, in the midst of giving terrorists intriguing ideas, state they’re not giving terrorists any information they don’t already have. I think they meant “information they couldn’t figure out on their own,” but that’s beside the point. Certainly their insistence that radioisotopes be better regulated, more tightly tracked and licensed, and available in safer forms, are all perfectly reasonable proposals. I don’t think they needed to couch them in an article full of highly unlikely terror scenarios. Is that how we have to get people’s attention now?
5 British students who collected terror information sentenced to jail. I hadn’t followed this but just from the story it seems to me they’d have had some difficulty in the U.S. putting these guys in jail. I mean, I’ve frankly got a houseful of the material these guys were sent away for. Sure, I can easily prove it’s for research and work purposes. And sure, these idiots were in the jihad forums chatting it up with the other wannabes. But although it might not be a bad idea for these guys to be locked up (it sounds like they were really a blight on society anyway), the whole thing still sounds a little like it was pushing the thoughtcrime envelope to me.
“Is that how we have to get people’s attention now?”
Yes (see DHS’s 15 scenarios). This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
Smartypants!