Monday Equals Terrorism

If they ever kill off Chloe O'Brian I will immediately turn off Fox's '24' and never watch the series again. I like Kiefer Sutherland quite a bit, but as far as I'm concerned he could be blown to scraps by rocket-propelled grenades and I'd remain a faithful viewer - just as long as everybody's favorite nerd-girl with the perpetually furrowed brow continues to slink onscreen and mutter things about "constraining the algorithm".

I'm all in favor of the unreasonable expectation put forth that young women should be able to fire a machine gun, hack their way into Linux/Unix root accounts and fashionably accessorize their wardrobes at the same time. God frickin' bless America and our famously oppressive ideals.

And the writers at 24 have it easy this season. What with all of the flapdoodle about domestic spying and the NSA they probably just keep Google News in one window and the screenwriting software in the other. Cut, paste, wait for the checks to roll in from Darth Murdoch.

If we're lucky they will actually portray the ludicrous situation at stake in this controversy - which is how the government should handle things when Terrorist A in the Pakistani hills dials up some dude in suburban New Jersey. Security experts have studied the situation and decided that, yup, it's quite reasonable in a 4th Amendmenty type of way to want to hear both sides of that little conversation. Properly dramatized in the '24' world this would mean Jack Bauer needs to fight his way though litigious ACLU attorneys and a whole boatload of congressional Democrats to be authorized to obtain a warrant - and for some reasons this also involves downloading a file to his PDA.