Thursday, 13 September 2001 : "Genehack"

...my thoughts keep turning to the longer term effects that these attacks are going to have on our society, on the shape of our daily lives. I'm going to be laying awake at night worrying about the tradeoffs that we're going to be forced to make, or bullied into choosing, or duped into believing in; tradeoffs that will reduce our personal freedoms for an illusionary and facile sense of security ... that as long as we carry our luggage inside the terminal instead of dropping it off at the curb, everything will be okay, and the boogeymen won't be able to get us.

At the moment, my stance is reluctantly hawkish. Reason seems very unlikely to work with the perpetrators of yesterday's attacks, so I fear that we will have to fall back on force; we will have to forcefully make the point that while it may be technically possible to do this sort of thing to Americans, on American soil, the final result is a terrible and awful retaliation.