Just a little perspective on the whole NSA tracking thing - yes it's bad, yes it needs more sunshine

[jtuck004]

but.

I know the government has special powers, and can hurt you. While you are thinking about them don't forget about commercial Americ (including political America) with an amount of data that is collected, and analysed (that's how they find things out about people like you, btw. Not you, but people who behave like you - which includes you). Perhaps 10 or 100 times greater than the amount being worked on by the government. Folks who don't need a warrant, perhaps not friendly to you, all to find ways to "mine" us for money or labor. (they want to license guns sales, maybe they ought to be thinking about licensing information sales).

You have to make your own value determination, but you don't have that advantage if you don't know what is in that mist swirling around you (It could range from what you go looking for at Target or Walmart to what hasn't been learned from the data being collected in medicine).

The biggest problem I see is that it seeks to find the lowest common denominator, not teaching growth, but sucking the profit, and life, out of everything. The forays into medicine look promising, but nothing keeps it from being used by a clinic trying to maximize profit at your expense, either.

It pays to know how people are shaping your world, eh?

And they still have years of this stuff in storage that hasn't been processed yet Job prospects are probably good, for any that are interested.

This next part isn't an ad, but allow me this short diversion, as I will get to my point shortly

>>
There is a new new plug in for Firefox that shows you the connections for cookies being used during your session, and all the interconnections between them and others...it's comes without additional cost - or support, possibly.
Their site, http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/

If you are not into installing software on your computer you can still see some tracking in action:
Youtube video:

Online Behavioral Tracking seems interesting enough to google - those are the sites with little red circles in the demo.
https://www.eff.org/issues/online-behavioral-tracking
>>

Oh, my point.

You are the product.

[creon]

1. Patriot Act

The root cause is the Patriot Act.
If people have a problem with this, they need to get with their Representative /Senator about it.

[jtuck004]

2. None of these people care a whit about the Patriot Act as far as the performance of their job.

They work with data everyone leaves laying around, mostly. Don't need a warrant. Mostly a purchase order. Sometimes not even that.