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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (7238)	12/17/2005 5:24:39 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541344

It only makes no difference if you really are completely blameless, or, more correctly, if the government thinks you are- and if you don't know you are being watched (or you are one of the odd creatures in the world who don't mind being spied on). You are presuming/assuming no impact- an assumption you cannot make for every person; an assumption you cannot even make for every "innocent" person. Further, if you do not know you are being watched, what you have is the illusion of freedom not the real thing. I guess the illusion doesn't matter until you realize it was an illusion and you get caught in some government net- but by that time you aren't going to be able to protest very well- even if you are innocent. I think that is why some people feel strongly that liberty is bound up in privacy- precisely because the government can so easily and secretly monitor us, and thus take away the freedom we presume we have -in other words- as you have proven with your tree- it's very easy to leave us with the illusion of freedom, and some people will even use the fact that we have an illusion of freedom (as you have done) as an argument that the freedom from being spied upon doesn't really matter in the first place. I find that pretty ironic.

To: Lane3 who wrote (7238)	12/19/2005 4:41:22 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541344

I can go to the Safeway and buy calamata olives and cream cheese, which I did this morning (damn Rambi), whether anyone observes it or not. I do not see how it makes a difference. Especially if I don't notice the tail. Surely if I'm unaware of the tail you can see how it makes no difference at all. Perhaps the difference of opinion, or at least part of it, is based on other people thinking of possible consequences of being tailed as part of the whole experience of being tailed, while you are mentally segregating the two. Many forms of gambling are illegal. Imagine that you liked to gamble, and specifically liked to gamble in illegal ways. Now imagine the government is tailing you to find this out. They find out your are gambling illegally. You get arrested. You would probably consider the law against gambling to be the root cause of your loss of liberty, and the arrest as being the specific way your liberty is reduced, while seeing the police tail as being a separate thing in a separate category, even if it was part of the chain of events that led to your arrest. The people on the other side of this issue may see the law, the tail, and the arrest as all being the same thing, or at least all being thoroughly connected and in the same category. Tim