Following FEMA's Zombie Preparedness Plan Could Land You On Terrorist List 527
colinneagle writes "As if warning a zombie apocalypse is imminent, FEMA hosted a webinar for its Citizen Corps encouraging emergency planners 'to use the threat of zombies — the flesh-hungry, walking dead — to encourage citizens to prepare for disasters.' The problem is many of those recommendations would have you do things that would flag you as a possible terrorist according to The DOJ's controversial 'Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities' guidelines. From the article: 'Don't be silly by thinking you must actually break the law before cops deem you a potential threat and report you. Paying with cash comes under numerous "you might be a terrorist if" lists. Whatever you do, stocking up on non-perishable food as the feds advise should not include buying "meals ready to eat" since that, too, is potentially suspicious and means you might be a terrorist. "Suspicious activity" at military surplus stores includes making "bulk purchases" of "weatherproofed ammunition or match containers and meals ready to eat, as does suspicious purchasing of "night vision devices include night flashlights and gas masks."'"
Are you a human being? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not suspicious (Score:3, Insightful)
I have some MREs in my car and a few in my basement that get replaced periodically for emergencies.
I guess I am both a moron and a terrorist then. I can tell you I know nothing about food storage. I am not also stocking up for a siege. I live in an area with snow and I might get caught without food on accident.
Um, yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
*Actually* preparing for a zombie apocalypse should get you placed an some other lists as well.
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is these are all things that civilians ought to be able to do without arousing suspicion, too.
Re:Not suspicious (Score:3, Insightful)
I think he meant you're a moron if you're buying them in bulk. Living off of them for a couple days to a couple weeks sure, but there are much better options out there for long term survival than MREs.
Did he disappear? Was he tortured? (Score:2, Insightful)
No? Then the system of checks and balances still works.
People who talk about the gestapo never know what this truly means.
The Gestapo doesn't ask if you are guilty. They decide, then torture you for information or just kill you. And if a second after they decided, they get proof from god that your innocent? No difference. THAT IS DICTATORSHIP.
Everything else is freedom with a legal system. And if you thought your legal system doesn't mean things can happen like being arrested on a mere suspicion and questioned for hours. Then you have just lived a very sheltered life. Any normal country with a legal system gives the police the duty and the powers to investigate, arrest and question to follow leads. Just hope you are never a subject of a investigation or will you will learn just what it means to live in a system with a working legal system.
Then again, since the line for emigration to places like Somalia where there is no police who can question you just for receiving a package, is non-existent, I get the feeling that either Somalia government is high efficient at processing immigration requests, or people prefer a country with a working legal system even if it sucks if you ever get caught in its gears.
Re:Please add me to the list. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Easy (Score:4, Insightful)
According to TFA, the Military are terrorists -
- Purchasing large quantities of ammunition, hydrogen peroxide (check the infirmaries), model aircraft fuel, compressed fuels.
- Unusually large quantities of fertilizer (well, not so sure about that one, but maybe they are teaming up with the Department of Agriculture).
- Large quantities of watches, electronic items - have you seen all the electronic gizmos that the DOD orders?
- A combination of unusual items - describes every military base I've ever seen
- Firearms and ammunition out of season - ditto.
- Night vision and camouflage equipment - double ditto; they have the very best night vision stuff, totally jealous.
- Pipe - I'll bet that the average military base orders thousands of feet of pipe (and pipe nipples) every year; do they tell you what they are going to use it for?
We'd better alert the Department of Homeland Security!
Re:Not suspicious (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you are just gullible. MREs are basically tinned food in a bag. The reason the military want them in a bag is because they are lighter and take up marginally less space. For civilians where lightness nor space are a consideration, buy tinned food, you will save a lot of money and not be scammed by inflated profit margins just because you bought your food in bags rather than tins. Note you will also get greater variety.
If I'm walking dead (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not suspicious (Score:2, Insightful)
MRE is convinent for a quick meal that takes up a small space if you have the ability to heat or cook it if required. For longer term survivability, they are not a good choice. I have a kit similar to this [costco.com]. You can still prepare for an emergency with standard off the shelf stuff from your grocery store without looking like a paranoid terrorist. Cans of meat like SPAM and DAK/hormel canned hams, canned and dried soups, tuna in oil, fruits, vegtables, all have shelf lives in the 2-4 year range. All of them are fully cooked and can be eaten by themselves straight out of the cold can or can be mixed in various quanities and heated for a "supper". Dry boxs and bags of things like Mac and Cheese, powered milk, flour, pasta, rice have a 1-3 year shelf life and can last longer if needed. Keep some of this stuff on hand and rotate through the stuff as you use them and you will have a good start without looking suspicious.
Re:Please add me to the list. (Score:4, Insightful)
Once everyone ends on this list, it becomes meaningless.
That sounds like a good idea, but there's always selective enforcement.
Re:Are you a human being? (Score:5, Insightful)
An eye opening moment on this subject was when CNN was doing some story and was talking to a single mother of two or three who wasn't well educated and living around Atlanta. This was two or three years after 911 and her life's biggest fear was terrorism. She lived in the outskirts of Atlanta and didn't work near any real target but thought the suicide bomber was coming at any minute.
Re:Did he disappear? Was he tortured? (Score:1, Insightful)
Way to go off on a rant. Can't you read or didn't you bother? The OP says nothing about gestapo or dictators. He merely gave an example of his friend being subject to an FBI investigation (and probably now on a watch list) for several years because he wasn't white.
Here's a fact for you: people aren't interested in moving to war zones, durrrr!
PITA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a parent requires you to have sex at least once. This is Slashdot.
Re:Are you a human being? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more likely to kill you than a terrorist? Worrying about a terrorist.
Re:Are you a human being? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, that might be the case in the US, but in other parts of the world we Christians do expect the return of the Son of God, but:
1- We don't have any idea when and how it's going to be, things might happen in any order (people that think they got a clear idea of how things are going to be from reading Revelations really startle me) and it can be tomorrow as well as it could be in ten thousand years.
2- We don't try to make the apocalypse happen - people that think they have a roadmap on how to make it happen are walking a path of big arrogance. Nowhere in the bible does God ask for any help making such things happen. He only told us to love Him and to love others, and tell them about His love. There's nothing there about manipulating geopolitics to trigger anything or any crap like that. But I guess some people find all that love stuff boring and want to collaborate by invading some country or forcing someone to say they believe in Jesus.
Re:Are you a human being? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's remember that in the entire history of this country, we've been invaded once (by our Mother Country), attacked once (at Pearl Harbor), and been terrorized once (on 9/11). Moreover, we had really good intelligence in each case that these events were coming and simply screwed up managing that information (if you believe the official versions or allowed them to happen for one reason or another if you believe in conspiracies.)
The whole point of terrorism is similar to an allergic reaction. The response outweighs the event so dramatically that it does infinitely more harm than the event itself. That isn't to say that blowing up the twin towers wasn't an affront to human dignity. It is to say that the number of innocent people that died as a result of that affront so outnumber the affront itself as to dwarf it to near invisibility, and worse, most of the people that died were innocent Iraqi bystanders who had no dog in the fight to begin with. In an allergic reaction your immune system can charge all the way up to anaphylaxis and death all over a few peanut molecules. We have to be very careful to teach people to weigh threats according to reality and when we catch politicians using the boogie man to scare the public into voting for abominations and the gutting of the Constitution, we need to drag these people out in public places and show the nation who the real terrorists are.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, here's a question... (Score:4, Insightful)
They should just be accepted as a cost of freedom and rejected as a highly improbable occurrence.
In addition, the U.S. gov't should stop oppressing people both at home and abroad. If they spent as much time looking after the interests of the average citizen and the common good of all Americans, and not just the wealthiest, most influential in the top one tenth of one percent of the population, we would not be the target of terrorist attacks.
Re:Are you a human being? (Score:4, Insightful)
The official UK government response? "Keep Calm & Carry On."
(Offtopic: yes, I realise us Brits were just as guilty of terror-based bombing campaigns during WWII.)
Re:Not suspicious (Score:4, Insightful)
They would be Meals that Refuse to Exit.
Re:Easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is these are all things that civilians ought to be able to do without arousing suspicion, too.
On the other hand, as soon as anyone goes full crazy, the media and internet forums are full of people breathlessly pouring over their purchase history, indignantly putting hands on hips and saying that somebody should have none such-and-such individual was up to no good because he purchased X thousands rounds of ammunition or what not. We saw it with the Aurora shooter, and the Virginia Tech guy, and doubtless several others.
If you're a bureaucrat making a public safety decision, it's nearly always better to err on the side of heavy-handness (and let your city/school/department/whatever get sued by the ACLU several years down the road) then to err on the side of civil liberties (and loose your job because some whack decides he needs to murder people for an idea/political philosophy/religion/voice in his head).
So how do we reconcile these things and remain a free and just society? I don't have the answer... and I doubt there's any one answer that is suitable for all times and places. Personally, I think it's legitimate/necessary for law enforcement to watch for suspicious activity and to have watch lists. But this can turn cancerous when such lists become a catch-all, when they are used to deprive people of rights without due process, or when they are used for systematic harassment (as revenge or "false positive" on an individual, or as a proxy for racism, for instance).
The good thing about this particular situation is that the DOJ is distributing specific, objective criteria to law enforcement; this helps temper the over-paranoid and clue-in the relaxed. The bad thing is that it conflicts with the sensible emergency-preparedness activities that FEMA has been encouraging. (As an aside: too bad we don't take EP more seriously. It would save a lot of lives if it did, and it'd be a good, concrete exercise in the quintessential spirit of American self-reliance.)
The list also seems a little on the paranoid side; I suspect this is because DHS is scared shitless of the lone wolf [wikipedia.org] terrorist. They can track cells/groups, but (according to this one guy in the 'biz) they've only been catching lone wolfs "by accident"... e.g., members of the public noticing something a little funny and reporting it. I don't approve of making "candles and boltcutters" a cause for suspicion, and yet I don't know how you re-design the system to be more... measured... in its approaches when people's careers depend on them finding needles in the haystack.
Re:Are you a human being? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's remember that in the entire history of this country, we've been invaded ...
Your "entire history" starts a little late. The Native Americans know the facts are different. Their land is still occupied by terrorist religious zealots.
Re:Are you a human being? (Score:4, Insightful)
THIS IS NOT A FUCKING PARTISAN ARGUMENT!!
Your preferred party IS NOT the shining angel ready to save the country from the UNENDING EVIL of the other party.
Both parties suck. They're both full of unscrupulous douchebags who'll screw you for another constitutional exception.
They'll both enact policies bought and paid for by corporate donors, regardless of how bad they are for the country as a whole.
The sooner you partisan cheerleader IDIOTS start figuring this out, the sooner you can actually start to get the US climbing back out of the cesspool of shit you've been digging yourself into for the last few decades.
The two parties are turning the citizenry against each other by partisan bullshit propaganda, and most of you are too stupid or oblivious - maybe both - to realize you're being played by the very candidate you're cheerleading for.