Akihabara rampage foretold but lost among myriad messages on Internet site

As they say hindsight is 20/20

Welcome to "1984."

S

A few years ago a teen-ager (14 y.o.) posted jokingly in an on-line bulletin board a sketchy plan to kill President George W. Bush. Within hours FBI agents raided his home, brought him away for questioning and seized all the computers in the house.

Maybe that was a tad extreme, but surely it wouldn't have hurt the Japanese state coffers that much if they had bought and set up the same kind of software used by law enforcement agencies of other major countries to scour the internet in order to find terms and phrases in messages that hint to crimes being planned and ferret out the authors before they put their plans into practice.

Oh, but I forgot: this is Japan, "the safest country in the world". Who would ever think that there was such a need?

Zenigata2 - so are you saying that there is such a need in any country? You are not bothered by all the false positives the American system is generating? You think that raiding a teenager's home and seizing his computer for a joke post is "maybe a tad extreme"? Do elaborate, because I can't believe my eyes...

Unfortunately, as much as the internet has increased world communication and made education accessible to everyone that has a phone line and a PC it has also brought the underworld and all the freaks out into the open to spread their personal blend of poison. Ban the lot of them! If JT can employ someone to moderate this site and the FBI can swoop on a teenager within hours of posting a threat, why is so much damaging information left on the net for anybody to access? When one of the arrestees from the child porn swoop in Australia was asked why he downloaded child porn his answer was plain and simple, "Because I could!" What if he couldn't? What if all damaging material was removed from the net? Would your reaction be sorrow or praise?

What if all damaging material was removed from the net? Would your reaction be sorrow or praise?

There we have it. That's the main problem. How do we define "damaging material"? Damaging to whom? Where do we draw the line? Do we even need to draw the line? In my opinion we don't. It has been proven and proven again, that people will find a way to access or publish any information they want on the net. Just like the fact that criminals sometimes use cars is not a reason to start performing full background checks on everyone who wants to buy or rent a car, the fact that psychos use the internet is not the reason to police it for everyone...

From the article "policing the sites also encounters an issue of freedom of speech," where do you think we all are, buddy, America?

Although time and time again, America has only proven itself to be anything but the opposite to being a land of the free... still, morally, one would tend to agree to the policing of harmful internet postings. However, you all have lived in Japan for a while now, you now know that Japan is not the technologically savvy country that we once thought it is (half of Japanese people don't know how to use, and do not have e-mail, only phone-mail). The J-police simply will not comply to using the same technologies that American polices use, whether it be a lack of technology savvy-ness or they just want to be non-conformists, OR what they claim as "opposing the freedom of speech," blah blah blah... Nothing personal, it's just a cultural difference thing.

<strong>Moderator: Readers, references to "American policies" are not relevant to this discussion. Please stay on topic.</strong>

This has really been an eye-opener to me & obviously if the same was picked up in other countries, especailly, North America, it will be very hard to understand for we have looked upon Japan to be a land of hard working people & so well organized.

Little did I realize the are he committed the crimes in, is knowen as a pink are of prostitures or so I understand.

See that I mean, by us outsiders NOT knowing what Japan itself is REALLY like as a country? Proving us to be very ignorant of outside of our home land. For beautiful scenery photos are not what Japan is like from one end to the other.

So as a regular of JT since '07 or around that time, I have been learning a lot though in such a vague way. Yet we have a fair number of Japanese people in this area of which some of them are good friends of mine & like me were farmers.

Smythe: I don`t understand what you are trying to say.