Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/29/0223253 Posted by: Cliff, on 2006-07-29 03:55:00 [1]gabec asks: "This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this [2]butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. [3]My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP [4]is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, [5]the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, [6]the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, [7]my own computer spies on me daily, [8]my bank has been compromised, [9]my phone is tapped--has been for [10]years--and [11]my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?" The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get? Am I just accustomed to old ways? Does the new generation, born with these restrictions, feel the weight of these bonds and recoil from my fears as paranoia? What can I, a person with no political interests--a person that would really rather think that the people in office are there because they're looking out for us, our rights, and our freedoms and not because their short-sightedness is creating a police state--do to stem the tide?" References 1. mailto:cooperg.myrealbox@com 2. http://www.broilkingbbq.com/grillpro/products.asp?CID=16 3. http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358 4. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/02/1238237&tid=158 5. http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=17180 6. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/15/1922209&tid=158 7. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060608002958907 8. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/23/AR2006062300... 67.html 9. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5399264 10. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=abIV0cO64zJE&refer= 11. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/21/1718219&tid=158 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]