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| Home Front: WoT |
| What happens when we don't defend our defenders? |
| 2006-05-22 |
| by Barry Rubin Blue Security was a company in California that defended against unwanted Internet advertising, not international terrorists, yet its fate tells us something very scary about the workings of politics in such matters. To fight the never-ending flow of spam, as such junk (and often obscene) mail is called, Blue Security sent out 522,000 messages to each spammer. This consisted of the equivalent of one complaint from each of the company's clients that the senders of such annoying and useless messages stop bothering them. Then, however, one Russian-based company escalated the war. It used special programs to take over huge numbers of computers all over the world -- without the knowledge of their unsuspecting owners -- to send even more spam messages that blocked Blue Security's site. The Russian company then issued a warning that sounded like something yelled from an 18th-century pirate ship to a freighter it intended to plunder. If Blue Security did not close down, the computer terrorists would deluge all of its customers with attacks of viruses designed to destroy their computers. Blue Security raised the white flag and went out of business. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Holland, the government announced that it was taking away citizenship from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, undoubtedly one of the most courageous people in the world. Ali was a Somali-born member of parliament who championed the rights of Muslim women. She has been the target of so many death threats from radical Islamists that she has lived in what amounts to protective custody by Holland's government during the last four years. Fears for her safety are not exaggerated. Since she announced that she no longer considers herself a Muslim, this is equivalent to a death sentence under Islamic law. Moreover, a Dutch filmmaker who worked with her on a film about the mistreatment of women in the Muslim community was killed by an Islamist immigrant terrorist on a street in Amsterdam. Ali is accused of lying on her application for asylum 14 years ago when she wrote that she was fleeing a forced marriage in war-torn Somalia. She continues to insist that the part about the marriage was true. Ali admits to lying about her previous location, since she had been living with her family -- who were legitimate political refugees -- in Kenya. Nominally, she is being prosecuted by an immigration ministry that is trying to enforce its rules more toughly. Yet what could be more ironic than throwing out the one immigrant to Holland who has worked hardest and most effectively to ensure that immigrants are moderate, law-abiding and ready to adjust to Dutch norms? Meanwhile, many immigrants preaching hatred and extremism -- and with less of a claim to political asylum -- remain in Holland. One can only suspect that the real reason is that Ali is losing her Dutch citizenship because she worked too hard for her cause. The desire of radical Islamists to murder her, preferably after torture, forces the Dutch government to spend resources and take risks to keep her alive. Perhaps this action is in itself a gesture of appeasement to extremists, trying to ward them off by waving one's hands in surrender. To its credit, the British government never looked for some loophole to kick out the author Salman Rushdie, who for years was the target of Iranian-inspired assassination attempts. Indeed, some of Ali's neighbors sued her in court saying that her presence in the area was both a security problem and a nuisance for them. She lost the case and has to move out of her apartment. Now she must move out of Holland altogether, her existence apparently having become a security problem and nuisance for the entire country. What do the Blue Security and Ayaan Hirsi Ali cases have in common? If free societies are incapable -- or, even worse, unwilling -- of defending their people against terrorists and pirates, this fact does not bode well for the future of freedom. Moreover, it is rather obvious that those who will be first and most intensively targeted are precisely the people who are fighting hardest against the terrorists. If those defending the frontiers of liberty, be it against computer pirates or Islamist terrorists, are allowed to fall, then precisely who is going to be willing to defend the rest of us? |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #3 I've been doing essentialy the same thing. I keep all the "Nigerian Scam" letters I get in a file, and whenever I get another, I send that one about 50 replies a day, one exact copy each of the last letters as they came in, when I run out of filed letters (220 currently) I either have no response from that person at all ever again, or more likely around the 4th day they block my E-address so I can't flood them anymore. Works for me, very few even attempt a reply. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2006-05-22 21:50 |
| #2 bad guys abound cruel, nasty, brutish, and short |
| Posted by: bk 2006-05-22 12:04 |
| #1 well said. Our biggest threat is from within. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-05-22 10:59 |