----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Maxey" : If we are decent, we have nothing to fear. If we are bad, we should be looked at. Any reasonable person should agree. Oh come on. Governments across the world have been abusing their powers for ages! We have an Australian sitting encarcerated at the pleasure of the US who has been in this state for years, no charges have been brought against him and none probably will - yet neither government has protested this. Some of both Stalin and Hitlers minions believed their actions were lawful as they were indoctrinated to believe so, and after all - they were government orders so they must be legal. Evidence discounting spurious evidence was not permitted to be tabled in a rather famous Aus court case where two people were tried and convicted of murder. MANY years passed before a retrial was ordered and they were found innocent - these were innocent people who had just lost their baby.. and the evidence that could have ensured they met with the sympathy and support they deserved was deliberately left out, evidence which swept away the 'evidence' presented in court. Injustices occur at the hands of courts and governments - handing out more powers seems to me a little scary. Oh, and re the earlier email - we all knew that typewriters could be used to prove the origins of letters (not trace them though), and I'm sure that information prevented a few cranks from wasting people's time with idiot letters - just as once it was suggested that hoax bomb scare calls were recorded (here in Australia), school kids stopped making bomb threat calls to their schools. : In better times, we are scared of any technology that seems like it could possibly be abused. We are scared only because it seems bad and it seems wrong but we do not know why. Worse yet, "they" know where we live and where our printer is located because of a bunch of stories on the web telling them "by God, be scared." I don't imagine it would be a big deal for the print driver to make a call to the OS and have it pass on your name, address and other info and register it in the dots - after all, mere couple-of byte long virus strings can and do run their own SMTP email programs, dredge this stuff out of your PC and use it in rather nasty ways. : Seems rather strange how much we want protection from the bad guys. Yet we do not want those protections to intrude into our personal space. Watch "them" but do not watch me. why is that unreasonable? Because our leaders tell us so? :I read a recent story about video surveillance cameras on the street. Something to do with homeland security. Having cameras was a great idea, just not in our neighborhood. Watch them, but never watch us. hmm, riddle me this - why is it being proposed by the various governments of the world including your own that you may not pictures of certain buildings, certain 'things' that are one day deemed inappropriate, yet scores of cameras now adorn streets everywhere - owned and operated by governments. What happened to the footage of the Brazillian executed in London - where there were many cameras around? Oh - they were all 'off line' at the time .. yeah, right! An innocent dies and there was no footage . : Just more line noise and wasted bandwidth. maybe. WOuld you rather have not known about it? Might be best to pretend the dots don't exist then ;) karl Perth, Western Australia Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." -- Herman Goering, Nuremberg trials (Gustave Gilbert- "Nuremberg Diary")
