Re: Stross: Lovecraft meets Dilbert?

personal to be monitored in a dragnet
fashion. You find out everything about someone: who their friends are,
what their opinion is on a wide range of matters, whether and who they
are having sex with, the full range of somone's activities and emotions.

The telescreen in everyone's home: the telephone.

* Main Justice, by Jim McGee and Brian Duffy, 1996, ISBN 0-684-81135-9
*
* The FBI had been spying on members of the civil rights movement.
* There had been burglaries and illegal wiretapping on a grand scale.
*
* The FBI obtained recordings of Martin Luther King in embarrassing
* conversations. Agents assembled the most graphic of these recordings
* on a single tape that was circulated to senior government officials
* and newspaper editors.

# "The Emperor Wears No Clothes", by Jack Herer, 1992, ISBN 1-878125-00-1
#
# FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover monitored Martin Luther King's sex life
# for five years and, in the MOST SICK situation, deliberately drove
# actress Jean Seburg to suicide with terrible ongoing federal letters
# and information fed to tabloids exposing her pregnancies and private
# dates with Negroes.

That's an overt use. Worse than that:

They can insidiously enter your life: Qubilah Shabazz was seduced.
Like Bill Murray elaborately seducing Andie MacDowell in 'Groundhog Day'
they can enter your life in an almost unconscious manner. Informants
manage to connect to criminals by running into them in the right place,
saying the right things.

It's the 1990s now:
Only, as we have seen, informants connecting to criminals means the FBI
targeting Randy Weaver WHO HAD NO CRIMINAL RECORD for blackmail. Anyone
can be made a criminal in the monitoring net. Or seduced into a "crime",
like Qubilah Shabazz. Without you realizing it, the person you met was
taking advantage of knowing all your most passionate likes and dislikes.

It is INSANE to design our systems for government monitoring.

CONGRESS WAKE UP NOW FOR CHRIS'SAKES!!!

*


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