*Druid returns wearing tinfoil hat and undies along with thwack resistant overcoat*

i have known for years that we have no real privacy. i always believed that for years the intelligence services around the world had the phone networks under surveylance and would begin recording conversations when triggered by key words which could be considered a danger to society like "bomb", "cocaine", "hostage" or "bush". also i remember stories as a kid about records being kept of every book considered subersive, like Catcher in the Rye or 1984 and if you bought one on credit card you went on record (so buy used with cash). however since i live in a country which allows a relatively high degree of civil liberty and freedom of expression, and i have never knowingly broken any laws, nor are my beliefs far from conservative anyway, i have never needed to worry about any of this.

what worries me today though is the possible use of information on the net by people other than governments: bank accounts, social security numbers, email account. i know that simple security steps can protect much of what you do, but i still think that it is easy for the kind of people who visit this site, who have at least the ability to turn on a pc without asking the grand kids for help, to underestimate the genuine fear a great number of people have today about going on-line. in other words the net is accessible in the physical sense to all who have a pc and a phone line, but it is light years away from being psychologically accessible by a vast amount of people.

i believe this fear is what will ultimately delay the net from reaching its full potential.

Hmm I wouldnt advise anyone to poke around in my stuff....It might prove fatal...or otherwise they will suffer from severe mind deterioation...or however that is spelled

Looks like a pen and paper is the safest....if you burn the paper afterwards that is

Well, i just but my ADSL madem on DMZ setting.
For all intents and purposes on the internet, i do not exist.

So, what sort of programs do you think theyll use? Bagel?

sw, you can still read burnt paper, best to shred it

ff is right; I rip up all of my mail and anything that has my name and/or address on it .

They can still read shredded...... best to shred, mix then compost, worms love paper.. it also makes a pretty good mulch....for the vegetables.. naturally

Harrier

I don't have a worm farm .

How do you read ashes?...I mean sure you can scoop up all off it and then begin pasting the right piece on the right place...but that might take a little while. and you'll have to be pretty good at puzzle building to do it effectively.

Macgyver did it once. Can't remember how. It involved a camera, and the burnt paper was indeed nothing but black char, but quite intact.

I was talking about reducing it to ashes

LOL.

I'm glad to know that we're all healthily paranoid

First off... I think it might be wise if people quit assuming that liberals don't approve of government/business invading our privacy, despite their rhetoric. It's not a liberal/conservative thing... it's a power thing. I don't trust anybody with power, period, and I especially don't trust anybody who says one thing and does another. In my experience... if you look at who has voted for these laws, you'll see that party lines are rarely meaningful. What is meaningful , imho, is that liberals in many nations have voted such things into law while lamenting them publically... which seems disengenuous at best.

But it's not just governments who we should fear- it's everybody who has an interest in us. Employers are usually the worst offenders , and they're the most guilty of not even bothering to tell you, or make you sign for consent, because in most countries, they don't have to.

Most large employers routinely save every email you send, run keyloggers on your computer, have cameras watching your every move... some of them even do things like put hidden microphones into bathrooms, so that if anybody is planning anything harmful to the corporate interests in the one place that people think they can get some privacy... they'll be found out. Smaller employers can't afford all of this, of course, but every year for the last decade, the prices to conduct surveillience of people have dropped, the tools have gotten smarter... and the laws on the books have allowed this.

Now, does anybody else think that this is a terrible thing? I sure as heck do. Among other things, it means that tech-savvy management could very easily use a corporation's security resources to gather blackmail material... or just out-manuever their peers in the endless meetings that most professionals know and hate. After all, how much does it take to bribe/subvert the underpaid and under-appreciated IT people who're usually responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of this stuff?

Corporate wisdom here is that it's better to catch the criminals and slackers and people breaking office policy (by sending email to friends, for example) and take the risks of massive abuse of privacy. I think... that's utter baloney.

So if any of you are politically-connected citizens, or ranking corporate officers... think about it for a minute. Is it in a company's interests to have an elite with secret police powers? I think not- if anything has been demonstrated by late 20th Century capitalism, it's been that top-down management styles aren't efficient- yet these tools are almost garanteed to be used by the same authoritarian people who like those styles of management.

I don't really mind that I'm on Candid Camera if I walk into McDonald's, mind you- and I don't mind that banks' counting rooms are full of monitoring devices- in the first case, there's a genuine risk of a thug waltzing in with a gun to rob the store, and in the second place... who wouldn't find sitting in a room with millions of dollars a little tempting? But the invasion of these technologies into every other sector of our lives isn't warranted by these special cases. If you have time... do like I did, and send letters to your government about these issues. If enough people are informed about the threats inherent in workplace monitoring then something might get done. It's in everybody's interests to keep workplaces reasonably private, including the corporations themselves, even though many top officers don't see it that way (after all, they're smart enough to see how this can be used to preserve their power).

If you own stock, you can also introduce a motion to ban these practices via proxy or letter at Shareholder's Meetings, which occur annually, biannually or quarterly, depending on the corporation's articles or the laws of the country. I suspect that many people here at TLR own at least some stock... so use the power that's been granted you... one of the very few ways that an individual can influence corporate policy is to introduce a motion like this and then send out a press release, which takes maybe two hours of your time (to write a formal letter and send out some email)....

Edited by - Argh on 12/19/2004 1:34:05 PM