On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Robert Munn <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 9:17 PM, denstar <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> >> FWIW, people spying on people is bad, but a government spying on it's >> people is worse. >> > > Government asking people to spy on other people over the legally protected > exercise of their rights is far, far worse than either of these things. > Allow me to illustrate. Imagine that every person on this list, every person you know, and every person they know is a potential informant for the government who could turn your name and email address over to the staff of the most powerful person on the entire planet, simply because you exercised your Constitutionally protected freedom of speech. You don't have to imagine this scenario, because it is exactly where we find ourselves right now. Until the White House repudiates the entire notion of collecting this information and black-holes the [email protected] email address, your name and email address could end up in a data store on the White House servers where, by law, it must be kept for years and years. Does that not concern you? What if a future administration dug up those records and used them to hunt down people that disagreed with them on specific policy questions? Is that a worst case scenario? Yes. Is it possible? Certainly. Would you trust future administrations with the safe keeping of those records against abuse? As I said before, nothing good can come of this tactic by the Administration, they need to back away and repudiate the entire idea as quickly as possible before it gets really ugly for them. The parallels to Nixon are already being drawn. Is that really an image Obama wants in the public's mind when he is in the middle of trying to convince them to trust him on health care reform? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:301674 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
