State of Perpetual Emergency

[Tim May]

On Monday, October 1, 2001, at 10:38 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 08:25:08AM -0700, David Honig wrote:
>> Yes.  Though these days they have Emergency Powers for everything,
>> and chronic, continually extended 'Emergencies'.
>
> I've always enjoyed the regular declarations of emergencies required
> to keep the encryption export control regime active.
>
> If an emergency exists for decades, can it still be properly called one?


Lincoln began the process with his emergency decrees, including his 
suspension of habeus corpus. (Basically, folks could be jailed without 
the state producing strong evidence of a crime.)

(I expect today's Emergency Orderers are sifting through all such 
decrees to see what they can crib.)

--Tim May