John Gilmore on PATRIOT Act and freedom in 1776 and today

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

---

To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>, gnu () toad com
cc: politech () politechbot com
Subject: Re: [Politech] Replies to Ashcroft touting PATRIOT Act as 
pro-freedom [priv]
In-reply-to: <6.0.0.22.2.20031118091414.04050d18 () mail well com>
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:59:25 -0800
From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>

>      1)    200 years ago - was there even the slightest possibility that a
> single individual could cause catastrophic or mass destruction on their
> own? -= perhaps if they carried a few pounds of Dynamite into a mine they
> could close it down - but that's pretty much it... There were no World Trade
> Center's to attack, no 747's or any other aircraft to attack them with. No
> dirty bombs, no fission or fusion weapons - no bioterrorist tools, so keep
> the perspective in place.

Surely you jest.  The world was a much less hospitable place for humans
in the 1700s and 1800s than it is today.

Mrs. O'Leary's cow devastated Chicago in 1871; see

  http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/oleary/

Presumably, a small group of terrorists could have done the same.  (A small
group of terrorists could have set the San Diego and Los Angeles fires
this year, too -- but they didn't.)

Many diseases ravaged the colonial American population; the recent biography
of President John Adams reports on page 507 and 513 that in 1798:

  "On July 16, Congress adjourned and departed the city with a rush.
  By July 25, when the Adamses set off, people were already dying in
  what would become the worst yellow fever epidemic since 1793."

  "...sickness and death filled the newspapers, week after week, as
  yellow fever spread in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and worst of all
  in Philadelphia.  By September nearly 40,000 people had evacuated
  Philadelphia.  Yet the newspapers continued to report more than a
  hundred new cases a day.  "The best skill of our physicians...have
  proved unequal to the contest of this devouring poison," reported
  the Aurora.  By the time the plague ran its course in Philadelphia,
  more than 3,000 lost their lives, including, as the Adamses were
  stunned to read, the mayor of the city... The list of victims also
  included four of the servants at the President's House, as Abigail
  was duly informed."

(There's that magic 3,000 dead people number.)

It is well documented that single individuals can and do cause
epidemics; among numerous examples some memorable ones arew Typhoid
Mary; the airline steward who spread AIDS; the initial Chinese person
who got SARS; and the smallpox-infested blankets given to Native
Americans by European settlers.  The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel"
surveys how plagues, both naturally and intentionally caused, decided
which great nations won or lost major conflicts.

Individuals or small groups could easily destroy the food supply for a
town or village, by burning its fields or by importing insects.  The
state of transportation was such that even the President took 12 days
to get from Boston to Philadelphia (November 12 to 24, 1798), despite
"the horses flying again, they made forty-five miles in a day".
Famines and droughts -- that can readily be alleviated today by
transporting large quantities of food or water -- were a regular
feature of colonial life.

Due to the difficulties of communication, particularly across the
Atlantic, wars always took years to finish.  In the War of 1812, for
example, the Battle of New Orleans was fought many months after the
peace had been signed in Europe, because the generals in the South had
not yet received the news.  Killing or capturing a single human
messenger was often enough to prolong a war by months, or to take an
army or a population by surprise and kill them all.  When warring
countries sent emissaries to negotiate a peace, these individuals were
literally at the mercy of the enemy.  Such troubles are the root of
today's "diplomatic immunity", in which certain people, called
"diplomats", cannot be imprisoned or prosecuted without the assent of
the sending country.  This odd rule exists because eventually all
countries agreed that wanton killing or unwilling imprisonment of
negotiators increased the ravages of war to all parties.

It's easy to 'imagine' that individuals had no power to cause great
destruction 200 years ago.  But Mr. Glassey is clearly no expert on
the dangers of life 200 years ago.  (Nor am I -- I just have common sense
and read books.)

        John
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