Some advice on how not to get suspected of terrorism

The Wall Street Journal reports: 

...new rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.   

The WSJ calls the new guidelines, "one of the Obama administration's most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S."

Predictably, civil rights America-hating pundits are making this routine legal adjustment sound like the end of the world when it's not.   Our president only takes away the kind of rights that most law-abiding American citizens never knew they had, rights few would miss.  The president knows that every time he takes away a freedom, it makes Americans feel that much safer.  Because the United States is the most free country on earth, we have a surplus of freedoms.  In a dangerous world, it's sensible to give up a few rights every now and again in exchange for the perception of safety.  

Unless your behavior is perceived to resemble that of a terrorist, the Obama Administration's new interpretation of Miranda won't concern you at all.  Nevertheless, a few precautions are in order.   

Our colleagues at the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) understand that the next terrorist attack will resemble the previous attack, and they are preparing for it.  By following several precautions, you help DHS narrow the list of suspects, making their job easier.   Moreover, by following our suggested guidelines, you will reduce the odds that you will be deprived of your Miranda rights, detained indefinitely, and forced to sleep naked in solitary confinement. 

Department of Fear Guidelines on how not to get suspected of terrorism

1. Don't have a lot of foreign stamps in your passport. 
2. Most Americans don't have a passport. What makes you so special?  Standing out only invites unwanted attention from Homeland Security.   Better not to own a passport.  
3. Never rent a minivan or any kind of truck.  
4. If you need items from the hardware store, get them delivered.  You don't want the police to stop you only to discover a chainsaw or a tank of kerosene in the back of the truck.   Or God forbid, boxcutters.  Always arrange to have hardware store supplies delivered to your home.   
5. Don't leave hardware store supplies in the garage where contents may be visible from the street.  Keep all home improvement and gardening supplies locked inside the house.  
6. Don't carry a camera.  It's widely believed that terrorists do a lot of street photography prior to launching their attacks.  Police think terrorists don't know how to use Google Earth. 
7. Don't install Google Earth on your laptop.  Some clever terrorists are likely to have heard about it, and there's people at the FBI who are on to this.
8. Never ever buy a one-way plane ticket. 
9. Don't use online software, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Microsoft.    The US military and the NSA monitor social media, and it's always possible that some message you send will be misinterpreted.  
10. In telephone conversations (whether cell phone or land-line), avoid speaking the names of big cities, national landmarks, foreign countries, or national political leaders.   NSA is listening and, trust us, you don't want to raise suspicions.
11. Keep your guns and ammo locked up.
12. Don't visit Washington D.C., New York, or any other city that has ever been targeted by terrorists unless you absolutely have to.   If you have to travel to DC or NY on business, remain in your hotel unless you have a reason to be somewhere.   For example, you don't want to be stopped strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House.  Do you expect capital police are going to believe that you were "just looking?"
13. Under no circumstances should women wear scarves. If it's cold, wear a hat instead.
14. If you are a Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, or practice any non-Christian religion,  try to not to dress strangely.  Men should shave their beards.  Women should not wear a sari.  Our police commonly mistake non-Christians for Muslims. 
15. If you are a Muslim, do not carry on your person any of the paraphernalia of your faith.  Shave. Tell your wife to ditch the burka.  Mind points 1-14 scrupulously.   God help you.
16. As soon as the notorious leaker Bradley Manning cracks, it's inevitable that WikiLeaks will be formally declared a terrorist organization.  This hardly needs saying, but DoF urges you to "unfriend" anyone you suspect may hold a positive view of WikiLeaks (even if a person is a family member or an old friend).
17. If you found it necessary to carry out recommendation #16, we advise you to report the names of everyone you just "unfriended" to the US Dept. of Fear.   

If you follow these 17 simple precautions, it less likely that you will be suspected of terrorism, deprived of your Miranda rights, and sent to a Supermax prison where interrogators will try to get you to incriminate yourself.

Always remember, they hate us for our freedoms.   

Hasta la vista liberal news media!

The free online print alternative to the NYT we propose would not only inform and entertain, it would scare people.

NYT:

Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month without paying, a limit that company executives said was intended to draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up the vast majority of the site’s traffic.

DoF analysts project that this questionable move by the New York Times -- it coincides with an escalating assault by patriotic lawmakers on NPR's budget -- provides an opportunity to end the hegemony of the liberal media once and for all. 

In hopes of turning one liberal newspaper's blunder into a knockout blow to the liberal media, SecFear Malcolm P. Stag III has just spoken with Rupert Murdoch about organizing an emergency conference on the Future of American Journalism.

Top of the conference agenda will be a plan to get corporate America (Koch bros, News Corp, ExxonMobil, BP, Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan, WalMart, etc.) to subsidize a "free" online print news alternative to the Times.  It's conceivable that FoxNews could be expanded to fill this role.  

According to SecFear, the proposed news service might not only be subscription free, but advertising free.   "It's clear that the 'liberal bias' that inevitably creeps into most news accounts by professional journalists tends to create myriad headaches for American business leaders.  Fortunately, most news stories have interesting corporate angles.   And the quality of PR writing these days is such that professional journalists are pretty much redundant.  The notion of separating advertising from the content of articles needlessly adds to the cost of producing content," wrote SecFear in an email to DoF staff this morning. 

Of course, a free online news alternative to the NYT should not only inform and entertain, it should also scare people.  DoF recognizes that Americans are crying out for "news they can use" concerning the threats posed by environmental regulations, terrorists, drugs, and illegal immigrants.  Is there any good reason Americans should have to pay for news?

http://twitter.com/feardept

Learning from China

UPDATED
This is one of those, "Why didn't we think of that!" developments out of China. The New York Times reports on an innovative means by which the Chinese are enhancing state security:

Beijing officials announced Wednesday that they intended to monitor the movements of millions of residents by means of information transmitted by their cellphones. One official was quoted on a government Web site as saying that the new program would provide “real-time information about a user’s activity.”

The project aims to monitor all Beijing residents who use cellphones — about 20 million people — to detect unusually large gatherings. One official said the primary use would be to detect and ease traffic and subway congestion. But Chinese media reports said government officials could use the data to detect and prevent protests.

This is something the US might deploy to track environmentalists, leftists, visa-holders, foreign students, and illegal immigrants.

But why stop there? In fact, since law-abiding American citizens have nothing to hide from their government, eventually this program of cell-phone tracking might be expanded to cover everyone.

UPDATE: We've just been informed by our friends at NSA that this program already exists, and China stole the idea from us.