Re: The End of Privacy ?

Tony Hollick (anduril@cix.compulink.co.uk)
Wed, 1 Jul 98 18:46 BST-1

Dale@Socrates.berkeley.edu makes a good point, and makes it well.

It is well worth while studying the literature on deception operations in espionage (Epstein's 'Deception' is a good place to start), and examining the manifold avenues to 'invisibility' that exist in the natural realm.

LOOMPANICS do some useful books (you may wish to use a cyber-cafe or anonymous browser when accessing the site, for obvious reasons).

In all Police States, you are 'free' to do whatever the State wants you to do, or is indifferent to. A major point to remember is that if the State's officials want you in prison, that's where you'll probably go. Whether you've committed any serious crime or not has very little to do with it, alas. The 'rule of law' has almost completely disappeared.

And remember that most of the (aptly-named) 'criminal justice system' is informer-driven: that is: informers tell the police who they don't like; or whose business they want; or whose apartment they want; or whatever. When the police come under pressure to produce 'results' they ask their informers to suggest a few names.

A growing similarity between the United States prison system, and Nazi Germany, Stalin's Gulag and the Chinese Lao-Gai system is that it's economically-driven. The bureaucrats use the inmates as cheap labour for public works schemes (in Seattle, the munuiciopality can rent eight inmates and a supervisor for $30 a day in toto for highway cleaning); or the inmates can be rented out to 'private businesses' for rates well below minimum wage. The 'consent' of the inmates is quite tenuous, obviously. Any money received by the inmates is taxed to pay for their incarceration.

And with 'private-enterprise' prisons, there's hardly any brake at all left on the growth in prison population, which is currently at 1.7 million and rising. 5 to 6 million Americans are imprisoned over the course of a year, and the number's increasing. Thank the ersatz-'Republicans' for this -- the prison population has _tripled_ over the past 18 years.

If you're rich, and have good lawyers, and political connections, well, that does help, of course, as it indeed does in every country in the world.

But "America the Free"?

"Kiss it goodbye", as the Eagles sang in 'The Last Resort.'

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      Tony Hollick, LightSmith

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<EOT>