Pure Madness

For decades, emergency-response teams approaching train wrecks have peered at the signs through binoculars to see what dangerous chemicals might be leaking. But federal officials will soon decide on a proposal to remove the placards from all tank cars. Their fear is that terrorists could use them to lock in on targets for highly toxic attacks.

These "federal officials" are fucking idiots. Could we please start using a little common sense here?

People who live near chemical and nuclear plants, dams and oil and gas pipelines complain that it has become harder to find out about disaster plans and environmental hazards, and some have sued for more information. Engineering reports have been stripped from government Web sites, and several agencies are creating new controls on sensitive information that go far beyond the wide-ranging classification system built in the cold war.

Federal officials say although they are trying to strike a reasonable balance, some clashes are inevitable, and more are likely to occur. If delicate information leaks out, "it gives our adversaries too much of a picture of what our vulnerabilities are," Jack L. Johnson Jr., chief security officer at the Department of Homeland Security, said.

Basically, we have bred an entire generation of overly paranoid government officials, thanks to 9/11.

These people need to get a grip and realize that terrorists are simply not randomly lurking out there waiting to strike us at vulnerable points, as they seem to think. The sad fact is that major terrorist attacks only occur with the sanction (or the actual direction) of US government intelligence officials. 9/11 being a good case in point.