Hey, welcome back - haven't seen you in ages - where've you been - showing off knives to the police again :P

Checked with Google and the conclusion is... they finally watched the fourth Die Hard movie :)

Terrible name though.

Just going off the news stories I googled, while I'm not at all in favor of this, it looks fairly harmless. The government can already track everything we do, everywhere we go, everything we do online, all political groups we associate with, and just about everything we buy with a minimum of red tape. While this could be used for Big Brother purposes, the government already has easier ways to do everything this could do.

I sense grim resignation.

I had a look around and one thing I find funny was all the conservatives complaining about it and Obama, forgetting Bush and the Patriot Act.
But yes, this is pretty scary.

Big Brother!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"I sense grim resignation."

You're largely right. I've been part of just about every form of conventional political action in this country in one way or another in the last decade and a half - public protests, legal action, voting and electoral politics, writing letters to the editor of the local paper, wagging my finger at government officials at televised public meetings - all have proved entirely pointless. Even my attempt at infiltrating the government by serving on a powerful local government committee proved to be by and large ineffective. Posting about this or that government atrocity or outrage of the week doesn't change anything - even if you convince everyone here to agree with you, nothing will come of your 'success' - no one with the power to do something will hear you and be swayed by your plea. The System will keep humming right along; if you ever became a real threat to the Power Elite, they would simply swat you like a fly and give whatever is left of your life not another thought (I've seen this happen to people). I don't see how anything is ever going to change short of lining the bastards up against the wall and shooting them in the back of the head, and that is a course of action which involves some serious practical and moral difficulties that would likely leave us worse off than we are now.

I've given up. The mighty will do as they will, and the meek shall endure what they must. It has always been so since the advent of government, and shall always be so. Human nature is what it is.

I enjoy that the main defense used by the NSA for any 'inadvertent' violations of privacy seems to be that they already happen.

In any case, you Americans have already sold your souls to authoritative government and resigned your rights away to the mighty back in the day along with the rest of us.


Hail Kapital! ^^

This is good news for the freedom of western citizens everywhere! Every such story that reminds people that they are being spied on and should be careful can only be an improvement on the situation of being spied on and totally unaware of it. Most werstern nations do stick to their highly valued laws that one mustn't spy on ones own citizens. We cleverly got round this by signing the UKUSA agreement in which the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand decided to spy on each other and share what they found. Spying on our own people has been a fact of life since at least the 40s and probably much earlier in various forms. Not a huge amount of harm comes from it unless you're really stupid, so lets not get into a panic.

Hey, Sicarius is back, my fellow anarchist! You're an anarcho-communist, right? Because I am an individualist anarcho-communist.