Prediction Time
Yesterday explosives were detonated at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and a fire broke out at the John F. Kennedy Library. The news cycle will likely consist of wall-to-wall coverage of this event until Friday. During that coverage many speculations and accusations of who is at fault for the explosions will be made. The New York Post is already running with the standard schtick that the perpetrator was a brown person from the Middle East. In all likelihood the war mongers will emulate the Post's direction and blame the act of an extremist Muslim brown person with ties to al-Qaeda while the Southern Poverty Law Center will blame the act on extremist right-wing Christian white people with ties to to the Ku Klux Klan and several neo-Nazi organizations. For all we know the explosives were set off by a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) created terrorist after somebody in ordinance accidentally supplied real bombs instead of the usual fake bombs (that's called snark, it's not a serious accusation). In the end it will probably take some time to determine who the culprit was but that won't stop the state from immediately exploiting the tragedy to justify another power grab.
Here are my predictions of what is to come. First the state will grab for more surveillance powers, as it always does after a tragedy. That means the recent opposition to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) will vanish. CISPA will be pushed through under the auspices of ensuring a tragedy like this never happens again. The Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) high speed low drag Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams will be present at every high profile sporting event, not just events that take place in expensive stadiums. VIPR teams aren't the only thing we're likely to see at sporting events in the future, I'll bet good money that restrictions against domestic drone usage will be loosened. The state's eyes in the sky will probably be patrolling metropolitan areas with notable frequency. Additional powers will also be claimed by the federal government for its war on foreign and domestic terrorists.
In summary we're in for the same shit as usual. If there's one thing the state never lets go to waste it's a tragedy.