In keeping with some terrific points you make here, I noticed that one of the first things the MSM trotted out was how the idea for pressure-cooker bombs was drawn from alleged al-Qaeda online magazine, Inspire. And surely it was no small “coincidence” that the Inspire issue in which the bomb-making details appeared also contained an interview with the droned American “terrorist” Anwar al-Awlaki. The implicit meme being: See, this (the marathon bombing) was why we had to kill al-Awlaki extrajudicially. Also an interesting “coincidence” that, as in the aftermath of 9/11, deadly poisons ended up being discovered in the mailrooms of congressman and the president.

As you say, what comes out of this is a chance for surveillance state vindication, as well as a test run for how citizens will respond to being locked down. Given the spontaneous jubilant chorus of “USA! USA!” following the arrest of the suspect, the state can only be pleased by the silver lining playbook doings.

One more ratchet click.

With the lockdown of Boston on Friday, all Boston Public Schools were shut down. It can be a lot of fun when school gets shut down due to a snow storm, because at least you can go out and build a snow fort, but here kids and families were supposed to just stay inside.

Presumably officials were concerned about the danger kids would face in getting to school. But if that were the driving concern and if lockdown were the solution, why don’t officials shut down cities when young people have to face gang violence on an everyday basis just to get to school? Many young people face very real dangers of intimidation and assault walking to school, just because they have to traverse neighborhoods controlled by rival gangs.

Instead of putting a whole city on lockdown, Chicago mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, is shutting down community schools. But this exacerbates the problems kids face in getting to school, partly because the distance across territory that is controlled by unfriendly gangs increases.

The absurdity of shutting down a city when the problem is gang violence is fairly straightforward. Obviously different interventions that actually rebuild community infrastructure (rather than the prevailing approach, which is to destroy it) are needed. There must be a way to apply that same common sense to a situation like last Friday in Boston. But not if the logic of the security state wins.

“I began to feel that I was losing my identity, that the person that I called Clay, the person who put me in this place, the person who volunteered to go into this prison — because it was a prison to me; it still is a prison to me. I don’t regard it as an experiment or a simulation because it was a prison run by psychologists instead of run by the state. I began to feel that that identity, the person that I was that had decided to go to prison was distant from me — was remote until finally I wasn’t that, I was 416. I was really my number.”

The effect of years of actual imprisonment with no way out in sight is unimaginable.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15442-defense-officials-downplay-growing-guantanamo-hunger-strike-with-bush-era-talking-points

It’s mostly just pointless; and a bit tone-deaf; and the skilled techie line is just weird (as you point out), but if it’s a character assassination piece it’s not a particularly good one. All it really says to me on that front is that things are complex and the good guys are never as good and bad guys are never as bad as they seem. Ok, sure.