It is amazing how an inexpensive technological development can render irrelevant billions of dollars of investment. In this case the security apparatus of Homeland Security. When I did the original 3-D printing story about three years ago the printers cost $50,000. Just a few weeks ago, when these printers hit the news big time the printers were $8,000. In this story the printer used was $2,600. I predict, within a year 3-D printers that can print guns will be less than $1000. Clearly dealing with terrorism requires new strategies, a different approach than asking people to surrender their civil liberties, and billions spent on building a huge intrusive security apparat. Click through to see the many pictures which will add to your understanding of what this issue involves.
How Mail On Sunday ‘Printed' First Plastic Gun in UK Using a 3D Printer, Then Took It On Eurostar
SIMON MURPHY and RUSSELL MYERS – The Mail (U.K.)
Phi Beta Iota: Those of us with intelligence and integrity have known from the beginning that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was an exercise in criminal insanity, flooding money and the militarization of domestic security across the land in very expensive very futile ways. At root DHS is an employment program, but in strategic turns, DHS is the worst national security decision ever made, right up there with waging elective wars based on 935 now-documented lies. Security — real security — is rooted in LEGITIMACY and it is a cultural construct. For what the USA has spent on DHS and the AF/IQ wars we could have given every person on the planet a free cell phone, free access to the Internet for life, and in so doing, set the stage for creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all, a world in which law enforcement could return to its healthy state as a safety net focused on a very small minority. DHS and its idiotic concepts of roving teams of near-illiterates arms with machines guns and dogs, violating all Constitutional protections that were created in order to establish legitimacy, makes DHS the poster child for illegitimacy. At the same time we still cannot find Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) despite this being the number one requirement for Measurements and Signatures Intelligence (MASINT), personally articulated by Robert Steele to the MASINT survey team that visited the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA) in 1989….be able to detect the explosives regardless of the composition of the container. Today a lethal bullet can be delivered by an undetectable container — and the reality is that any well-trained person can kill an unsuspecting fool with a sharpened pencil. Security is not about detecting THINGS. Security is about creating a society in which trust is the common currency, not suspicion. Security is about educating, nurturing, and protecting all of the people all of the time, not serving the 1% and enabling their looting of the Commonwealth. Speaking only to the USA situation, it is clear that the existing form of “governance” that lacks intelligence with integrity is NOT WORKING. We pray for a non-violent transformation in America, one that can only emerge from Occupy, the Independents, and the small parties agreeing to demand an Electoral Reform Act in time to flush Congress and the Executive of most Republicans and Democrats, by 2016 or 2020.
See Also:
Durant, Will. Philosophy and the Social Problem, Annotated Edition. Promethean Press, 2008.
Falkvinge, Rickard, “How to Bypass TSA / Airport Security” 13 May 2013
So what is the lesson here? You can do whatever you want, but someone who has enough anger or hate will always find a way. Instead of stripping people of their civil liberties, dehumanizing them, and creating more angry people… focus on empowering people, and adjusting foreign policy to not be abusive towards other countries. Stop trying to make the world fit your little plan and fix your own problems. That is the way to minimize your risk of attack.
Manwaring, Max et al (eds). The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century. Praeger, 2003
