Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 1 of 10: Liz K  (ekelley) * Mon, Oct  1, 2001 (20:46) * 5 lines 
 

 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 2 of 10: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Mon, Oct  1, 2001 (21:55) * 5 lines 
 

 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 3 of 10: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Tue, Oct  2, 2001 (15:49) * 7 lines 
 

 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 4 of 10: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Wed, Nov 14, 2001 (05:59) * 46 lines 
 

 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 5 of 10: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Wed, Jan  9, 2002 (13:18) * 37 lines 
 

 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 6 of 10: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sun, Feb  3, 2002 (08:07) * 2 lines 
 

 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 7 of 10: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sun, Apr  7, 2002 (20:23) * 78 lines 
 

The EU is the most developed example of a postmodern system. It represents
security through transparency, and transparency through interdependence.
The EU is more a transnational than a supra-national system, a voluntary
association of states rather than the subordination of states to a central
power. The dream of a European state is one left from a previous age. It
rests on the assumption that nation states are fundamentally dangerous and
that the only way to tame the anarchy of nations is to impose hegemony on
them. But if the nation-state is a problem then the super-state is
certainly not a solution.

European states are not the only members of the postmodern world. Outside
Europe, Canada is certainly a postmodern state; Japan is by inclination a
postmodern state, but its location prevents it developing more fully in this
direction. The USA is the more doubtful case since it is not clear that the
US government or Congress accepts either the necessity or desirability of
interdependence, or its corollaries of openness, mutual surveillance and
mutual interference, to the same extent as most European governments now do.

. . .

The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double
standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open
cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of
states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the
rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception,
whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth
century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law
but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the
jungle. In the prolonged period of peace in Europe, there has been a
temptation to neglect our defences, both physical and psychological. This
represents one of the great dangers of the postmodern state.

. . .

The premodern state may be too weak even to secure its home territory, let
alone pose a threat internationally, but it can provide a base for non-state
actors who may represent a danger to the postmodern world. If non-state
actors, notably drug, crime, or terrorist syndicates take to using premodern
bases for attacks on the more orderly parts of the world, then the organised
states may eventually have to respond. If they become too dangerous for
established states to tolerate, it is possible to imagine a defensive
imperialism. It is not going too far to view the West's response to
Afghanistan in this light.

. . .

Today, there are no colonial powers willing to take on the job, though the
opportunities, perhaps even the need for colonisation is as great as it ever
was in the nineteenth century. Those left out of the global economy risk
falling into a vicious circle. Weak government means disorder and that
means falling investment. In the 1950s, South Korea had a lower GNP per
head than Zambia: the one has achieved membership of the global economy, the
other has not.

All the conditions for imperialism are there, but both the supply and demand
for imperialism have dried up. And yet the weak still need the strong and
the strong still need an orderly world. A world in which the efficient and
well governed export stability and liberty, and which is open for investment
and growth - all of this seems eminently desirable.

What is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world
of human rights and cosmopolitan values. We can already discern its outline:
an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and
organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle.

. . .

The postmodern EU offers a vision of cooperative empire, a common liberty
and a common security without the ethnic domination and centralised
absolutism to which past empires have been subject, but also without the
ethnic exclusiveness that is the hallmark of the nation state -
inappropriate in an era without borders and unworkable in regions such as
the Balkans.

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 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 8 of 10: Marcia  (MarciaH) * Sun, Apr  7, 2002 (22:20) * 1 lines 
 

I've been watching Greece go through the throes of becoming ain integral part of Europe. It is not all that easy and there are still a lot of pre conceived notions to get past before it will truly work. I was very sorry to see the Drachma disappear into history. Happliy, I was sent a few samples so I also hold Greek history in my hands along with English, Scottish and Welsh.

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 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 9 of 10: Marcia  (MarciaH) * Sun, Apr  7, 2002 (22:21) * 1 lines 
 

What we DO NOT want to do is to make a martyr out of him. If that happens, then make it a dead one. Sorry gang, but this man is deadly and a menace even his own family disowned.

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 Topic 45 of 96 [news]: What can we do? What should we do?
 Response 10 of 10: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sat, May 24, 2003 (18:25) * 127 lines 
 

05-24) 11:59 PDT SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) --

Jay Walker jump-started an online shopping craze by inventing
Priceline.com, the Web site that lets people bid on airplane tickets and
hotel rooms.

Now Walker is hoping his newest brainchild revolutionizes a completely
different field: national security.

The premise behind Walker's USHomeGuard is simple: America has 47,000
power plants, airports and other "critical infrastructure facilities."

Walker believes a terrorist can get within 100 feet of most of them,
unchallenged and undetected, and kill or injure thousands.

But if onsite cameras beamed photos to the World Wide Web, Americans could
monitor these sites from home. If they spied a potential attacker -- a
masked man trying to scale a power plant fence, or a van parked next to a
reservoir -- they could alert security agents with a click of the mouse.
Agents would call local authorities and help avert disaster.

Walker envisions spotters getting up to $10 per hour, paid by the
government agencies and companies that need protecting. He wants to sell
USHomeGuard to the federal government for $1, then charge fees to run the
system.

Critics dismiss USHomeGuard as a doomed scheme that exploits Sept. 11
paranoia. Others question the effectiveness of a security system built on
the Internet -- itself vulnerable to hackers, power outages and
congestion.

David Wray, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said
federal officials have not done any "serious evaluation" of the project,
adding that the agency isn't contemplating a defense strategy that hinges
on Internet surveillance.

Despite such skepticism, more than 10,000 people have visited
USHomeGuard's new Web site, and Walker said he could get hundreds of
thousands of Americans to sign up for home-based, work-when-you-can jobs.

"We like to think of USHomeGuard as a digital victory garden," Walker told
a recent tech conference, referring to vegetable patches Americans planted
to help ease food rationing during World War II. "It lets people be part
of the solution."

USHomeGuard is a twist on distributed computing, an idea that captured
imaginations in the 1990s, when thousands plugged their PCs into the SETI
project to scour radio telescope signals for extraterrestrial
communications.

Walker wants to distribute surveillance across thousands of computers and
the people who use them. He says spotters could register online and get
paid for clicking through photos and sending data back to USHomeGuard's
central database.

The spotters answer a simple question about each image: Does it contain a
person or vehicle? If yes, local authorities could be notified in as
little as 30 seconds.

Walker said it's possible to guard against errors and attempts to foil the
system.

For example, as many as one in 10 photos may be traps. If a spotter clicks
"no" on a photo of a masked man airbrushed into a reservoir photo, the
software suspends him for three minutes -- without pay. He must requalify
by clicking correctly through several test photos.

If a spotter clicks "yes" on an unstaged photo, he triggers a first-stage
alert. Software automatically routes the same photo to other spotters, and
Web cams mounted near the site of the potential attack site beam more
photos to more spotters. When many spotters click "yes," they trigger a
second-stage alert. Security supervisors at a data center review photos
from all the Web cams and analyze video from the site.

Supervisors who see a suspicious person can speak to him through the Web
cam: "Why are you approaching the reservoir?"

If the trespasser is toting a rod and says he's going fishing, the agent
might simply ask him to depart. If he doesn't, the security agent may
alert local authorities, who could arrive within minutes, depending on the
location.

Walker, who has so far funded USHomeGuard with his own money, says he
could quickly muster the volunteers needed to guard as many as 3,000 sites
by the end of the year.

But it's unclear whether airports, chemical plants and other sites would
buy it. Security experts say recognition software can spot potential
attacks more economically and with more accuracy than thousands of
Americans getting paid $10 per hour.

"Asking people to make a determination of human or not human based on
static images is going to be extremely difficult," said Gary M. Lauder of
Atherton, Calif.-based Lauder Partners, who heard Walker's business pitch
in February. "A computer could probably do a better job."

Bruce Schneier, co-founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., praised
Walker's fresh approach. But he noted that USHomeGuard could not have
prevented the World Trade Center attacks or the recent spate of overseas
bombings.

"Like every security product, it would do some good against some evil,"
Schneier said. "This has nothing to do with suicide bombers in crowded
markets or airplane terrorists. This would work in no man's land but
nowhere else."

Firefighters, police officers and others who investigate scenes worry that
such a system would generate too many false alarms and require computer
upgrades and extra employees.

Capt. Joe Carrillo of the San Jose Fire Department, which protects dozens
of technology and defense laboratories in Silicon Valley is bothered by
the expense.

He said California's worst budget crisis in a generation will doom the
idea.

"People get suspicious easily, and this could quadruple our call volume,"
Carrillo said. "The idea is really good. But the timing is really bad."



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On the Net:
www.ushomeguard.org/

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