This is good fun, but it will be a very sad world if in 2030 people are still upvoting and downupvoting on Digg and Reddit.

I think it would be a dark day for a government that sent out things like this. I'm very glad noone I know seems to have received something like this. :)
A good reminder of what information is out there, though.
   – imma
usual ps for things like this ...
ps : "People shouldn't be afraid of their governments – governments should be afraid of their people." ;-)

Nice post.
Am I allowed to put a french translation on my blog ? (affordance.typepad.com) ?
I will naturally mention the original post.
Thanks by advance.

Olivier, yes, thanks...

This reminds me of Little Brother... (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/)

really hoping the world doesn't come down to this

In a recent BBC drama, The Last Enemy, one of the main story lines was a company pushing their TIA, or Total Information Awareness system that allowed the type of comparison and searching this article mentions.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/lastenemy/

With some interesting stats at the bottom about CCTV & id cards etc.

You don't think governments are already learning about us via Twitter etc.: http://www.bitstrips.com/user/21181/read.php?comic_id=79773&subsection=1

This is a great example of where we are headed if things don't change.

Many people here in the US are afraid of what might happen if certain types of people "Those Bushies, those Republicans!" get elected. But the reality is that in many cases the alternatives are even worse. Cradle to grave coddling by big government will certainly lead to things such as this a lot more certainly than any "war on terrorism" alone.

Just to give one example... Alleged abuses to privacy attributed to anti-terrorism activities have thus far not lead to any substantial change to how people (non-criminals that is) operate on the Internet. I'm against the government spying on its citizens, so I'm not saying any such monitoring is good, I'm just saying there haven't been documented abuses, YET.

Take one the other hand the recent elimination of Internet News (aka USENET) by major ISPs over the potential (there were a few isolated cases) of child porn being posted there. I can't imagine that if this goes unchallenged (as I suspect it will) that the government won't be emboldened to further censorship based on DNS servers, blocks of IP addresses, scanning of text on web pages, etc. If this precedent is followed they will simply make it the ISP's responsibility to do this filtering as a cost of doing business (a cost, by the way, which will be passed on to us).

Single-issue voters who vote over what a candidate says about one or two issues (abortion, health care, global warming, health care) had better start thinking about the roaches that come with that packaging.

Of course I've become a single issue voter too, it's just that my single issue is "smaller government" which I think will ultimately cure a whole host of problems, and the problems it doesn't cure probably couldn't be cured by bigger government anyway.

"Open Source Data Mining", CIA is already partnering with at least one university to train up people in aggregating information from disparate sources.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=626734
(article is weak on specifics)

This type of traffic awareness has been in the works since the internet began – consider Carnivore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28software%29), and what it was meant to do – and how Phorm and similar companies are really extending on that concept at the ISP data collection level.

imma: "People shouldn't be afraid of their governments" I agree with, but not that "governments should be afraid of their people".
The people should *be* the government.

macbeach: There are benefits to smaller government in many cases, but it should not be made a cause in and of itself.
The government should express the will of the people. In such a situation, curtailing government leads to suppression of the will of the masses.
This, of course, favors the will of the elite, such as corporations. A balance is preferred.
"Small government" should be pursued as a way to seek this balance, not as an end in itself.

2032? It's happening now folks. Support net neutrality.

:(am scared

[moved]

Just to mention that an authorized french traduction of "A Notice From The Bureau of Public Anomaly Screenings" is now online : http://affordance.typepad.com/mon_weblog/2008/09/bureau-denregis.html