Re: [LUG] surveillance

You're a commodity, any information about you is bought and sold legally, what is known about you will be surprising to most, and the conclusions and models based about what they do know, and what they can predict about you will surprise even more. Facebook and Google didn't get rich out of providing free services without any catches. Tesco doesn't give you loyalty cards out of loyalty. Starbucks doesn't give you free coffee for free.

I don't doubt the government, MI5/6, the police and others have far more information about you and me than I could expect. We're tracked in a hundred ways every day and if nobody's pulling together these strings in some huge Orwellian system already, then it won't be long. And if it's not, I would put it down to the incompetence usually shown by any contract involving the government and computers, especially when it comes to gluing different systems together. Yes, the Human Rights laws may prevent what's legally tracked about us, but I don't doubt laws are broken every day at this level. And if you've got a healthy skin tan and a beard, well, almost anything can be justified under the "what if..."

So you have three choices, as I see it:

1) Sacrifice the ease of modern living and the comforts associated and live truly off grid. Good luck, and you shouldn't be here at all if that's the case.

2) Know it's going on and spend your life worried and feeling... Well, I was going to say paranoid, but it's not if they really are out to get you, is it?

3) Accept it and get on with life, knowing you're monitored to a greater or lesser degree. (That crime still happens and goes unsolved suggests I'm painting an overly pessimistic view - unless that's what you're *meant* to think! Maybe "crime" only exists to disprove suggestions like this?)

I even think the time has passed where an investigative journalist could "expose" the system. It's already accepted, here, and doing very well.

(If you never hear from me again, I might just have been onto something)