Re:US Customs wants to collect social media account names at...
by lovich on Monday June 27, 2016 @12:58PM
(#11987518)
Being a context dependent term is what makes questions like these from the government a big problem. Its like Nineteen Eighty-Four where "we have always been at war with EastAsia", only now the changing term is what constitutes a terrorist, or some other group the government has decided to not like
Re:US Customs wants to collect social media account names at...
by throwawaysocks on Monday June 27, 2016 @09:05PM
(#11990776)
Meh.
Terms of art will always borrow and re-define colloquial language. Do programmers aspire to 1984 because they re-appropriate the word functional?
Defining an explicit list of "terrorist organization"s may or may not seek to redefine the term terrorist, but it is not tantamount to willful restatement of established historical fact (a la "always been at war").
No one would seriously would assert that the term-of-art definition of terrorist == the dictionary denotation of terrorist. That is the meaningful line in the sand between mere rhetorical ploy and outright democratic totalitarianism.
A lot of words function like this. E.g., "believer".
When a christian asks me if I'm a believer I might say yes.
But then I'd probably say no if a wiccan asked me the same question.
Obviously, that doesn't mean that everyone (or no one) is a believer once you fix some additional context.
So in summary, according to the sense in which the USFG is using the term, you're simply not a terrorist.
Everything else about your post is just a slippery slope argument, which may or may not be valid, but certainly isn't well-substantiated.