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I hope you had a nice weekend cowering in your home, refusing to leave or answer the door, in accordance with orders issued by the United States Department of State. On Friday the department issued a “worldwide” travel alert, lasting until the end of August, sort of generally alerting traveling Americans that terrorists exist and intend to hurt us.
Terrorists may elect to use a variety of means and weapons and target both official and private interests. U.S. citizens are reminded of the potential for terrorists to attack public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure. Terrorists have targeted and attacked subway and rail systems, as well as aviation and maritime services. U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.
Just a reminder: Your life is in peril. Terrorists could attack anything at any time using “a variety of means and weapons.” Have a kick-ass summer!
We needn’t be entirely cynical about this. 22 embassies and other diplomatic posts have been closed in the Middle East and North Africa. Unlike similar vague warnings in the past, this one is not suspiciously close to election day. There is likely some genuine intelligence about some sort of attack that led to this. But that raises questions posed by Philip Bump this weekend: If the American intelligence community was crippled by the recent leaks about its operations and tools, as so many have claimed, how did they manage to collect the intelligence that led to this alert? The head of the NSA told us that the terrorists read all those Guardian stories and immediately took action. Presumably they now no longer use “telephones” or “the internet,” whereas before they were all blissfully unaware that the United States had the ability to spy on them at all.
LINK (at the risk of getting on some US NSA Watch list - which they totally told Congress they don't have. And even if they did have couldn't ever use without a totally independent Court authorizing it. And the reason the totally independent court authorizes 100% of the requests, it's because they requests are written really really good and only look at terrorists. And never ever to they look at any single piece of data about you because they are bored, or wonder what their ex-wife is up to or who was that dipshit that cut me off was - let me see if I can magically use his license plate to get his name and put that asshole on the terrorist watch list - then let that mofo try to fly to Miami this week haha. We would never do that. Honest. Because we don't capture every piece of data (we don't call it metadata). Oh wait, we admitted that? Nevermind. I didn't understand the question.)