Totally agree. and thank you for bringing thesis and antithesis. Wonderful post!

Lets not exaggerate!

Exactly! and you are being monitored everyday "for your own security and safety".

All this spying business reminds me of entrapment. Not because the law etc is inducing a person to commit an offense that the person would otherwise have been unlikely to commit but in other ways like the law/government wouldn´t have known if anyone was commiting an offence without spying on them in the first place. (They also wouldn´t have known if a person would commit a crime without entrapping them in the first place).

The biggest one of them all though is that if they catch someone watching/dowloading something illegal, whether it be child pornography or even the recently released movie, they shouldn´t just go for the person who is downloading it for personal use but the person who is running the site itself and they would be able to do that a lot quicker if they wasn´t spying on every tom, dick and harry they pleased but just simply have some common sense and type in something on google or some other search engine to find an illegal act going on and then do the work they was meant to do.

Yeah, the thing is countries have different policies towards illegal downloads - some sites are in countries that do not protect copyright. If I´m not mistaken, it is perfectly legal to download music/films in Poland, provided you erease them from your disc within 24 hrs. Upload, on the other hand, is illegal

 Hmmm as interesting as that is, somehow I don´t see anyone dowloading something to a disc for just 24 hours

I do the same. 

I don´t get any spam through my private email address and didn´t get a great deal through the one I use for registering on sites.  In fact, I don´t register on many sites.  I don´t visit dodgy sites either. So. . . now I am wondering just how effective the "Big Brother" system is because recently I have been receiving a great deal of spam (about 5 a day) through the email address I use for registering . . . "Do I want to buy Viagra?" "Do I want to acknowledge my application to join the Yaho Group´sexy Miss Webcam´?" etc. 

I don´t know who they employ to spy but they are definitely not secret service material.lol

The "big brother" system is very effective, if even someone in your local council has powers to read every email you write, every post you have written on a website, every msn conversation you have?  They should not have such powers! 

They do this for such minute reasons as "not attending the correct school in your area" or "fly tipping" or making elected people feel a bit uncomfortable when you start to question their motives.  Unbelievable!

It is unbelievable that a person from a local council, who might know you in person, has the right to read your private correspondence! I´ve never heard of something like that. It´s a whole way different from a computerised system looking for "key words." And it definitely has a potential to result in abuse

What rock have you had your head under? Who knows who reads your stuff? ...but I can´t say I really have had any illusion of privacy online....you are probably less private online than anywhere. After all, it is an invention of DARPA.

I do object to having my very body invaded by things like the backskatter xrays now being used at many airports. I wouldn´t want to walk around naked, or do I in any way like to have photos of my naked self anyplace. Besides the invasion of my privacy and there are health concerns. It is an xray and there IS radiation.....

I also question the collection of DNA as a crime fighting tool. The problem with DNA is it involves one´s whole familial lineage, opening up another can of worms. Then....it really isn´t fool proof.

There have been incidents where one person carried more than one set of DNA, say one in the mouth and another in the blood. Intersex persons have multiple sets of DNA. So, say DNA is collected from the inside of the cheek, but there is another in the blood?

Then there are cases of chimeras, such as the case of Lynda Fairchild, a chimera (....read the twin inside me.) To make it brief, she was tested for proof of maternity. When her sons were tested, (several times) they didn´t match. In fact the DNA was so off, her maternity was questioned and she was about to be prosecuted for fraud and loose her children, when a lawyer who handled a similar case stepped up and was able to bring to light the fact Lynda was a chimera.

I value my privacy. If you do to, you may like to check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation´s website. There are some interesting questions to consider.

I´m sorry Alameda, but you´re sounding a tad paranoid. I don´t know why this obsession of your very self being watched instead of billions of other Internet users. Like I said, I do not have any skeletons in my closet and I don´t really give a rat´s tutu whether somebody chooses me over all other users to read my emails to friends, in which I tell them about my son´s development.

DNA discrimination? Are you for real? You mind alleged DNA tracing but you´re ok with women being openly treated like dirtbags in the Middle East? How about being against finger print based evidence since it may happen that one person had them surgically removed...

See, people don´t need to go as deep as DNA goes to discriminate, in most cases it´s enough to have a visible quality - like age, gender or race.

You may choose to disagree with me, but Internet surveillance has more benefits than actual threats to the freedom of individual. Besides, you´re free to stop using it if you value your privacy that much.