Thursday's Wall Street Journal contains a tendentious and sloppy opinion piece (reg. req'd) attacking the supposed tacit collusion of US privacy watchdogs with al Qaeda; by mingling the timeline of pre- and post-9/11 strategies for passenger screening, and misstating the reasons for the ineffectiveness of each, it manages to come to the pleasing conclusion that 9/11 was all Bill Clinton's fault, and that those pesky privacy types are facilitating the same again today. The concluding quote:
There is no way to keep a terrorist from flying without first trying to determine who he is. Yet the most innocuous identity verification system prior to a flight is now seen as tantamount to illegal surveillance. With the rights advocates back in the saddle of national security, al Qaeda can blithely get on with its business.
We also noticed the piece's preferred term for privacy groups: privocrats. Now, perhaps this construction is enough to make one the toast of the next VRC cocktail party, but it's also fairly stupid. Presumably intended to be a combination of privacy and bureaucrat, it misses the fact that the typical person with concerns about privacy is not a part of the bureaucracy, which is precisely what has them so worried.
But anyway, if one was curious as to what the opposite of this word might be, there's a ready option from Northern Ireland in Sinn Fein's favourite word, securocrats, capturing that very blurred line between administration and domestic security policy. A term of special relevance to residents of New York City and Washington DC, wondering why more and more of their daily routine is dominated by decisions made by unelected and thinly accountable officials offering the rote response "security reasons" to all questions.
There is no way to keep a terrorist from flying without first trying to determine who he is. Yet the most innocuous identity verification system prior to a flight is now seen as tantamount to illegal surveillance. With the rights advocates back in the saddle of national security, al Qaeda can blithely get on with its business.
We also noticed the piece's preferred term for privacy groups: privocrats. Now, perhaps this construction is enough to make one the toast of the next VRC cocktail party, but it's also fairly stupid. Presumably intended to be a combination of privacy and bureaucrat, it misses the fact that the typical person with concerns about privacy is not a part of the bureaucracy, which is precisely what has them so worried.
But anyway, if one was curious as to what the opposite of this word might be, there's a ready option from Northern Ireland in Sinn Fein's favourite word, securocrats, capturing that very blurred line between administration and domestic security policy. A term of special relevance to residents of New York City and Washington DC, wondering why more and more of their daily routine is dominated by decisions made by unelected and thinly accountable officials offering the rote response "security reasons" to all questions.