So what happens when security needs are valued over the needs of liberty?

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
 Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” -- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Quotes (Author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)

Removing Some Data from Zotero

I will be removing some data from my Zotero database regarding privacy methods that can be used for criminal activity.

On one hand, I included the material for the sake of completeness.  However, at the same time, the misfeasance (if not malfeasance) of the security community in ignoring identified terror threats (Tsarnaevs, Mateen, Hasan, etc) while using illegal and ineffective bulk collection methods against the public at large led me to include the methods in place for privacy's sake.

I have long believed that the privacy versus security balance in this country is far out of whack.

I have been reexamining the relationship between cybercrime and terror financing, and have decided to go ahead and remove some of the material I consider to be the most dangerous.