Planespotting, is this a bad thing?

I was reading an article on the Village Voice titled, Planespotting regarding the CIA using aircraft to ferry prisoners to various so-called torture centers around the world. The article went into detail how individuals throughout the country satisfy their curiosity, imagination and hobby of watching aircraft, commercial, private and military and in the process have uncovered (in their words) secret “torture Taxis” which ferry terrorism suspect to various countries.

The article is quite in-depth, it is evident the reporter spent a considerable amount of time interviewing individuals engaged in the Planespotting hobby and other journalists who have uncovered secret holding cells in European countries. I did not have any trouble comprehending anything the reporter wrote and to be honest, I already had ideas this was an on-going practice.

My feelings on this subject is “so what!” this is a war and we are fighting it to win. I have often stated that individual liberties should not apply to a non-citizen or someone taking up arms against this great nation. But, that is not what I am writing about this practice, not at all.

The article lays out how the individuals engaged in the hobby of Planespotting conduct their own form of black ops to obtain numbers, destinations, secret landing strips and other information related to flying. While reading the article the thought suddenly struck me if average citizens are able to discover this information and actually drive up to and past secret landing strips while military aircraft are being refueled, what is to stop a terrorist from using these same techniques?

This is a travesty that the average Joe and Mary citizen has access to tail numbers, serial numbers, flight plans, secret landing strips and whatever they can dig up from the wealth of information available on the net. They also have the Freedom of Information Act and worst of all, from the loose mouths of friends and beer drinking friends on active duty as this article points out.

An individual bent on conducting terror attacks upon our country has access to this same information and can do whatever they wish without anyone ever having knowledge until the attack is over. Let us bypass the basic view of this story about secret jails, what I feel is more important is the fact that anyone has access to anything they want and to view any secret base they wish and no one is doing anything about it. This is beyond my comprehension that our military has not taken better precautions to insure the secrecy of their mission.

We need to enact a national secrets act similar to that of Great Britton, we need to take precautions and we need to do it now, before it is too late.