This is f*ing ridiculous:
A Silicon Valley college student says the FBI confronted him and threatened to "make things difficult" for him if he didn't hand over a GPS tracking device he found on his car, says a report at Wired.com.
Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old marketing student at Mission College who is partially of Egyptian extraction, said he found the device last Sunday when he took his car to a mechanic, and saw wires sticking out of the underside, near the exhaust pipe.
He told Wired he had "done nothing to merit attention from authorities."
What did this person do to get this kind of attention from the FBI? Why was he under surveillance for "three to six months"?
His friend wrote this on Reddit:
bombing a mall seems so easy to do. i mean all you really need is a bomb, a regular outfit so you arent the crazy guy in a trench coat trying to blow up a mall and a shopping bag. i mean if terrorism were actually a legitimate threat, think about how many fucking malls would have blown up already.. you can put a bag in a million different places, there would be no way to foresee the next target, and really no way to prevent it unless CTU gets some intel at the last minute in which case every city but LA is fucked...so...yea...now i'm surely bugged : /
That is the reason why the FBI bugged his car. His friend criticized the war on terrorism in an internet post.
How stupid is the FBI, that they aren't able to tell the difference between that, and a legitimate terrorist threat??
That is all you have to do these days to become a terrorism suspect. One poorly worded internet post, a Middle Eastern background, and the FBI will assume that you are the next Osama Bin Laden.
(No offense, FBI. Don't take this personally. Everyone makes mistakes. I know you do a lot of good work, and arrest plenty of real terrorists and criminals...)
Anyways... this is ridiculous. Not just this, but the whole War on Terrorism. It's basically a third Red Scare. The only difference is that we are hysterical about Muslims now, instead of Communists.
Here's the truth about terrorism. In the last ten years, there was 9/11, and then a few minor, miscellaneous attacks. Altogether, around 4000 people have been killed on American soil by terrorism in the past decade. About 400 people per year.
Now lets compare that with some other causes of death:
* Heart disease: 616,067
* Cancer: 562,875
* Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 135,952
* Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 127,924
* Accidents (unintentional injuries): 123,706
* Alzheimer's disease: 74,632
* Diabetes: 71,382
* Influenza and Pneumonia: 52,717
* Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 46,448
* Septicemia: 34,828
The truth is that terrorism is a joke. It's a minor nuisance, and nowhere near as important as the government and media think it is.
Why have a War On Terrorism, when it is such a minor issue? Why not declare a War On Smoking? Smoking is a much larger threat to Americans than terrorism is. As you can see, cigarettes kill about half a million Americans per year. Terrorists kill about 400, and that is a wildly exaggerated number, because large, successful attacks like 9/11 are extremely rare.
That is the reason why the FBI is spying on innocent college students. Because there simply aren't that many terrorists in the USA to find. It's like finding a needle in a haystack. It's really hard to do.
So anyways, why does the government have such screwed up priorities? Why focus on terrorism, when we have much larger problems, like smoking, car crashes and murders? Is the military industrial complex responsible? Is it right-wing fear-mongering? Media sensationalism? Why is terrorism all-important? What is going on? Have we all lost our minds?
For some reason, it seems like it's forbidden to even ask these questions. It seems like the War On Terrorism is a political third rail. Why is that?
I'm not sure. But I really think it needs to end. It is a big waste of lives and money, and is destroying our civil liberties. We should end both the wars, change our laws back to what they were in the 90s, take some deep breaths and calm down, and start solving more serious problems.
For example, instead of following college kids around, the FBI could be helping to solve murder cases. A 17 year old boy got killed down the street from me this summer, but that hasn't been solved yet. The police and sheriffs here don't seem to have the slightest clue who did it. They could use help from the FBI. I think that would be a better use of law enforcement resources.
Is anyone else skeptical about the War On Terror? It seems really blown out of proportion to me...