Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Damn good point, that last sentence. It's funny; I've never known any other way.
Because the morons will always be the majority, and they are easily incensed, someone's gotta stand up to them with that mixture of pure vision and the just plain crazy that looks like bravery in retrospect.

When I heard the LAPD guy interviewed on this subject, on NPR, I kept wondering: He says it's not 'profiling', but if it isn't, then what could the definition of that term possibly be?
 

Wow. I suppose it isn't surprising, considering the depth of fear and hatred of the dreaded Islamofascistcommunist Enemy Forever floating around out there. I am quite sure there will be someone (I won't name names . . .) who will come along and say that the ACLU and other anti-American groups are endangering your life by challenging this perfectly sensible measure to understand The Enemy Within, who will come and kill your wife and rape you, or the other way around.

And, obviously, they will be full of shit.
 

Now that's funny. Stopping the "police" from mapping concentrations of Muslims in Los Angeles. Wow, let's see, every direct mail system in the country already has those enclaves completely mapped out down to every household and the street and which side of the street it stops on. They will sell you any ethnic group, racial group, religious group, bicycle group, golfing group, etc. that you want.
If you don't want to buy a commercial product, stop in at you local Community college and ask the geography teacher if he can have some of his students pull up some maps with their Geographic Information System (GIS) and the Census data for you. Oh yes, have them map out all of the nearby probable terrorist targets as well.
While you're at it include the location of all the best donut shops too.
Last but not least just walk across the street to the Los Angeles County Planning Commision and ask them for the maps they already have in a digital format and that are in the public domain. If you want to watch all of those Muslim areas with some limited but realtime satellite surveillance, just subscribe to the commercial version of Google Earth.

Good Lord we are Americans are so damn naive about what has happened to us already. Sit back relax, it is done, we just don't believe yet.
 

Say here is the GIS for the County. See what you can do on line. Then consider what you could do with access to the complete system.

http://planning.co.la.ca.us/intGisMaps.htm
 

I'm not sure what your point is, drlobojo. Perhaps it is naive to think that there would be a firewall between the public services you describe, which are pretty benign, and the police, whose intention is not quite so benign. Yet that naivete is based on the perhaps equally naive idea that this firewall is real, and necessary. Just as home phone records may be available, but until Bush were not open to police and intelligence scrutiny without a warrant, the firewall between the kinds of things - mapping, etc. - you describe and the ethnic profiling and control by the police use to be real. That they are not can be laid at the feet of the Bush Administration.
 

The "firewall" is a lie.

For example, every phone call or internet pulse in America goes to the NSA and has since at least 1988.
No paranoia, just the way it works.
The only saving grace is that there is so much data only the fastest of computers can handle it. People can't do it. The bad news is NSA has acres, yes acres, of those computers.

The Jin are out the bottle and in your home.
 

Since the ability to actually manage the amount of data we use in various communications has been publicly displayed as lacking; since we allowed a handful of Middle Easterners with the proper paperwork to co-ordinate a complex plan over a series of months to pilot planes in to buildings while the bureaucracy bumbled and fumbled; since I feel safe at night knowing that the least competent people are actually in charge of dealing with this information (the Peter Principle is always alive and well in public bureaucracies) - I don't worry all that much.

I have family members who were involved in intelligence work; not recently, but they did do it. I will tell you right now that, as good as they were, it is a long way from the guy in the field (or sitting in the cockpit of a plane) to the analyst's desk in Washington or Fort Meade. The information passes through so many hands, with so many astericks, scribbles in the margin, and addenda and detailed questioning of the individuals competence and/or clarity of thought, that we have ever achieved anything through national intelligence is more surprising than not. Remember how everyone from the CIA, DIA, and NSA was caught flat-footed in 1989? Not the folks in the field, but those in charge at their desks, who were committed to the false ideas of the permanence of the Soviet Union, the unbreakable nature of the Warsaw Pact, and the unspoken and unchallenged notion that the Russians would use force to keep their Empire together.

I see no reason at all to believe the competence, intelligence, or insight of the analysts has increased in the past 18 years. Dealing with something as huge - and as disparate - as our domestic communications, can only lead to screw-ups. I know of what you speak, and it is not paranoia. I just don't fear it, because the people who are responsible for dealing with it are just too stupid to do it right. They foul up every. Single. Time.

That is why I oppose these kinds of things. Not only are they a violation of basic civil liberties and the social and political contract of the United States, they will never work correctly because the algorithms created to deal with them are faulty, based upon faulty assumptions, by people blinkered by the twin problems of ideology and a lack of understanding of how the game is really played.
 

Well stated.
But..."They foul up every. Single. Time."
Not exactly. When they do it right you'll never know it. But, then maybe we don't need to under those circumstances.

Back to the original point. if the LA cops want maps of where the Muslims are they are readily available.
 

"if the LA cops want maps of where the Muslims are they are readily available."

sure, but without any policy relevant to them, the maps are useless. it's not the database, but what you plan to do with it.

KEvron
 

"what you plan to do with it."

oh, and i don't beleve for a minute downing's flimsy excuse for having such a database; the idea was born out of ignorance, in the environment of fear which we call the bush presidency.

KEvron