privacy, esp. the loss thereof

A massive database that the government will use to monitor every purchase made by every American citizen is a necessary tool in the war on terror, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

The Bush administration has plans to create a centralized facility for collecting and examining security-related e-mail and data traffic and will push private network operators to expand their data-gathering initiatives, according to an unreleased draft of the plan.

The proposed cyber-security Network Operations Center is included in a draft of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, which was developed by the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and is due for release Sept. 18.

The call for expanded data collection and analysis results from administration concerns that efforts to secure cyberspace are hampered by the lack of a single data-collection point to detect cyber-security incidents and issue warnings, according to a draft of the plan, which was obtained by eWeek.

Critics, however, worry that such a system would be expensive, difficult to manage and allow government agencies to expand their surveillance powers. [Duh, why do you think they want to set this up?]

EMAIL FROM A READER, 8Oct02 [to WhatReallyHappened.com]: I went to our local bank on Sep 28, 2002 to cash a check for $2600.00. Guess what? They did not have the cash to handle this check. I had to get travelers checks instead. Hmm. I asked why this was so, since I see so many convenient store folks deposit cash daily here. This is NOT a bank in a mall or a grocery store. It is located as a standalone brick building. As far as I can remember, this place has not been robbed so why the paranoia about keeping cash?

The manager was quite apologetic but told me that this was a new trial "policy to keep all possible transactions on paper and minimize the use of dollars". They would rather we use electronic payments than use cash whenever possible.

Did you ever think you would live to see the day when your grocery shopping would be recorded and made available to the government? The same is happening to your personal finances, even that men's magazine you bought while waiting at the airport (after the body cavity search) is not beneath the notice of the government. The US Government is not afraid of terrorists, it is afraid of YOU; that you will one day wake up and discover you are a people, and that you have strength, and that you recognize you are not free at all but a slave, and that you will do something about it. Americans are the most lied-to people in the world, and now the most spied-upon.