You're taking American policies and practices and assuming that they're present throughout the Western world, I can assure you that is not the case. In Britain and most -if not all- of Europe simply claiming something is a 'matter of national security' doesn't give anyone licence to do whatever they want at any cost. Of course spying is always going on, much of it illegal by anyone's laws - but that's all done in secret. As I explained in my previous post, putting logging into end user's software is impossible to hide, there aren't any governments in Europe who would want to risk the kind of backlash that would come about when the public realised that they were being monitored from their own computer by their own government.


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Given their ruthlessness and lethal ability to act you should be very concerned about such security matters and assume that anyone who starts screaming in a forum about "tinfoil hats" is an operative of such an entity concerned about a lucid post which reveals too much. You won't always be right about that assumption because of the copy cat nature of such posts, but more often than not you will. If challenged such a poster will attempt to defend itself by pointing out that it is a "long time member here" as if that disproved the suspicion.

- I think right here is where you left the rails. You honestly believe that there are tens of thousands of employees of government agencies just surfing the net contradicting people's conspiracy theories? It simply wouldn't happen. Not because they couldn't or due to any moral reason, but simply because they don't care. If a bunch of people posting on http[i][/i]://some.random.forum.com think that the government is spying on them and want to talk about it do you think someone at MI5 or the FBI suddenly thinks "we've got to stop them before they start a revolution! I know, let's call them paranoid!"? I think you grossly overestimate the importance placed by the government on your or anyone else's opinions. At most a single employee might glance over it's content and dismiss it as immaterial after having been caught, processed, and tagged as possibly noteworthy by some large-scale monitoring system.

I'm sure there are plenty of occurences in which a government agency oversteps the bounds of what I would consider reasonable and infringes on people's privacy, however utilising end-user software as government-endorsed spyware isn't one of them. I'm afraid that it's people who cry wolf about 'big brother' and government conspiracies who dilute the potency of valid concerns about privacy issues and help paint the picture that every internet privacy advocate is a paranoid nutball.


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