[melito]

As much this reads as FUD, I agree.

That's what I was getting at with my "Breaking Bad" comment.

A sort of "total depravity" is already a big part of pop culture, so it'd be easy to ignore false positives of people crying wolf.

What I was getting at is that what they're looking for is kind of a big unknown. If media about illegal things is so popular and they ignore it, it leads one to think that data being mined is possibly being used in a fashion similar to a personal agenda.

That's what's truly dangerous about monitoring at this scale. It's not so much that it's happening it's that they're creating something that could grant someone almost god like powers.

If I were to make an analogy, I'd say it's like a man buying a pistol to protect his family and then his child finds it loaded in a night stand.

[vajrabum]

It's funny you should mention godlike powers. We're pretty fast reaching a point where an individual can have "god like" powers for not very much $$$. You could argue that the genie isn't out of the bottle yet, but I think the point is arguable. As reprehensible as this sounds, maybe it'll turn out that whoever did the 2000 Anthrax attacks did the human race a favor.