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Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Of course this is probably the main reason for the program in the first place
Posted by Jill | 11:41 AM

If the internet weren't in such wide use, and if people hadn't had access to overseas news outlets that AREN'T in the pocket of the Bush Administration, and if you couldn't read blogs, most people probably still wouldn't be aware of the Bush Administration's lies and criminal activity.

So if you believe that having the White House monitor your internet activity is about stopping kiddie porn, or about nabbing terrorists, you're fooling yourself.

The fact that Biggest Dickus is Watching You is already having a chilling effect:

Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy."

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute?

Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. "I told him I'd Googled 'rent boy,' just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night," she said.

[snip]

Jim Kowats, 34, a television producer who lives in Washington, has been growing increasingly concerned about the government's data collection efforts. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I just feel like it's one step away from ... what's the next step?" Mr. Kowats said. "The government's going to start looking into all this other stuff."

Until last year, Mr. Kowats worked at the Discovery Channel, and a few years ago, in the course of putting together a documentary on circumcision, he and his colleagues were doing much of the research online. "When you're researching something like that and you look up the word 'circumcision,' you're going to end up with all kinds of pictures of naked children," he said. "And that can be misconstrued."


That's the America the Bush Administration has created. It's a nation in which people doing legitimate research on the Web are now afraid that a government sweep of search engine records may show that in a perfectly innocent search, something the Bush Administration deems suspicious may show up.

Does anyone honestly believe that this sort of tactic protects even one child from predators or even one person from a terrorist attack?

And if so, is the former Soviet Union REALLY the country you want to live in? Because that's what you're getting with this bunch.
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