All email to be monitored...
POSTED BY: Storymark
UPDATED: Thursday, March 15, 2007 02:06
VIEWED: 2769
PAGE 3 of 3
You know, I work in Security, and you're right...you think we watch EVERYTHING all the time? Neh. You're right, it's more to keep a record of what's happened or to keep an eye on something that someone has informed us is happening. To watch everything and everyone at once is just a waste of resources. People can whine about statistics if they wish, but you can still tell a shoplifter mostly by looks, believe it or not.
...and isn't Yahoo Chat already doing something like this, and has suddenly found their membership dropping like crazy?
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I really don't think it would be all that difficult to keep backups of everything with the automation that computers allows for. Of course I don't think that everything is monitored by people. You would need one person employed by the government to montor every person that uses the net, and even if you had that manpower and the cash to back it, who would watch the watchers?
No, I do believe though that everything is archived somewhere. Cellphones, IM conversations, BitTorrent and other p2p downloads, etc.... It's all there somewhere, ready to be dug up if need be. Most of that stuff wouldn't be allowed in court anyhow at this point. What government organization wouldn't love to have the ability to go back and peruse all the records of somebody they wanted to keep tabs on though? Just because they couldn't use the information in court against you doesn't mean that they couldn't use prior discussions you've had to set up a sting or put a narc in there to befriend you and set you up.
That's kinda the jist of 1984. The main character Winston knew that they had the ability to have vidscreens and mics on pretty much anybody who mattered at any time of the day, but nobody really believed that every second of the day they were actually being watched. They just knew they were watched often enough that the fear was there to keep them from doing anything BigGov didn't want them to do, lest they be wisked away in the middle of the night by the thought police to live the rest of their (hopefully) short lives in the Ministry of Love. If you've never read the book before, it was to the point where people were terrified of even owning their own paper and pens because they were banned from writing their own thoughts down, and they had to train themselves to keep a straight face because being spotted on camera when you looked angry or even too happy about anything was rumored to be enough to warrant a visit from the thought police.
I see no reason to believe that we don't have the technology to do this already.
For more on 1984, check this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
Spoilers abound though. It's a great book and I recommend anybody read it. It used to be part of mosts school's cirriculums, and though it hasn't been banned in school today many schools do not teach it anymore. I never read it myself until I was 22 years old.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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" It's worse than you know . It usually is... "
The folk who don't believe that we live in a surveillance society are just ignoring the evidence .
Yesterday , a lightplane made a hard landing near Norfolk , Virginia . It was on CNN Headline News within minutes of the crash .
Out of curiosity , I did a quick lookup of the aircraft's registration number , because I was curious about who the plane belonged to , and any more details about the ' crash ' .
Almost instantly , I found out where the flight had originated , a radar-surveillance track , and the exact geophysical representation of the time and place where the crash had occured...
And this was about an hour elapsed total time since the crash happened...
' In 1755 (Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor, Tue, Nov 11, 1755), ( Ben ) Franklin wrote: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
This phrasing was also the motto in Historical Review of Pennsylvania, attributed to Franklin .
It's important to note that this sentiment, with many variations, was much used in the Revolutionary period by Franklin and others. '
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"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
One of the greatest quotes in history.... "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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