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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: philv who wrote (19991)	1/3/2004 2:53:02 PM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81980

Phil > Anything is possible when government agencies spy on people. What's next? A knock on the door? Could be. I have lived through a time in SA when that happened all the time. Anyway, people are either naive or stupid to believe that things they write on the internet are "private". I can assure you that everything I write on this thread I do in the firm belief that some or other government agency, in the US, SA or anywhere, could get hold of it. But I also know that these are busy people and they don't waste their time with "conspiracy freaks". Anyway, W and his bunch couldn't give a stuff what anyone thinks. >>> In many cases, the entire contents of a person’s computer can be siphoned out and transferred to a massive database in Virginia for further analysis and additional counter intelligence measures. It is estimated that various US government agencies have gathered over 700 trillion pages of information on American citizens during the past decade alone that is stored on magnetic tapes and online storage information retrieval systems.<<< I found this so amusing. One can just imagine the rubbish that the database holds. And pity the poor fellow who has to sift through it. No wonder they get so many false alarms and screw up on the real McCoy. There is a well-known expression which applies to computer databases --- garbage in, garbage out. I suppose that expression could also apply to governments.

To: philv who wrote (19991)	1/3/2004 4:22:55 PM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81980

Phil > Orwell's "big brother" is a lot more active than a lot of people realize. This is what the Legal Editor of Pravda thinks: english.pravda.ru >>>... the disconcerting advantages the Bush dictatorship enjoys over Hitler's are the scientific advances that have made the implementation of fascism much easier. New technologies have given the government Orwellian capabilities. Programs now exist to decipher every stroke made on a computer keyboard, to spy upon people from great distances, to create databases designed to blacklist and harass those who don"t obsequiously genuflect before official dogma, and to install microchips into vehicles, and even into people, to monitor their every move. In addition, advances in genetics provide the opportunity to establish a "master race," simply by denying insurance or other medical care to those with genetic proclivities to certain diseases, and to create DNA databases that will enable the government to categorize and/or spy upon individuals with certain genetic predispositions. There is also the glut of "recreational" technology to keep Americans inactive and thus ill-informed: computer games, videos and DVDs, 24-hour sports broadcasts, hundreds of television channels available through cable or satellite, and a media enamored with a "cult-of-celebrity" to distract the populace with superficialities (innocuously called "infotainment") while social injustices are ignored and freedom and democracy decimated. In fact some social critics recently noted the irony that more outrage had been generated over the methods used to select a champion in college football than the methods used to elect a president.<<< I beginning to feel that living in darkest Africa isn't so bad after all!