Nice to see the Watts story get some coverage on one of the larger political blogs.
I quite like this bit:
It’s ironic, though, that the same day I was arrested one Mary Callahan, chief privacy officer for Homeland Security, was up here in Canada reassuring us that the border isn’t so bad a place after all, and the US doesn’t just arbitrarily grab people’s personal data willy-nilly. Almost as ironic as the fact that I still haven’t got my laptop computer, flash drive, or notebook back.
(I’m still keeping Truecrypt on any laptop that crosses the border with me.)
On a vaguely related note, I did some reading today on the Just-world phenomenon, which in a nutshell “refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is just so strongly that when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it”. I can’t help but think this goes far to explaining the comments I’ve seen on some articles about what happened to Watts.
