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Add stopping this to the list of "things to do after the Democrats take over Congress".

Don't forget to vote, everybody.

And remember, as one leading Democrat has said, if Democrats control either house, there's going to be "oversight, oversight, oversight". Look how much has come out with the Republicans in charge: everything from the plan to divide up northern Iraq amongst oil companies to the CIA's torture program. There has to be more stuff we haven't heard about. Look forward to people like the FBI Director testifying under oath before Congress. Coming soon to a C-SPAN channel near you.

You might also want to volunteer to be a poll watcher, especially if you're in a state with Diebold voting machines.

However, by one tiny chip of compromise after another, one infinitesimal shift to accommodate a "reasonable response" after another, a group of people can turn into "The (choose ethnic group) Problem" and suddenly it's okay to treat people as things, the only capital crime there is. You never quite know where you cross the line and suddenly you have become the enemy your grandparents fought war, bloody war to prevent from turning the future into a long night of horror.

Will you have the courage to say "NO" to the new Gestapo? They're just nice guys like you who have a job to do, y'know? Or will you draw a line somewhere and say "At long last, Mr. McCarthy, have you no shame?"

(*Title refers to the short story in The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Find it and read it. Was a school experiment designed to show how good people could turn into black, black Nazis and why there were no Nazi's in Germany after the war. Scares the tar out of me, more so as the days go by.)

Since the terrorists will be using encrypted messages or coded messages which don't appear to be anything special (you know those -1 Slashdot comments are for something), this will help retrace the terrorist's online activities after people have died in a terrorist attack. My guess: lots of porn and a few messages to E-mail accounts which no longer exist.

It's just that there are so many disposable E-mail accounts available and the easy access to Internet cafes. If someone is using a disposable E-mail account and an Internet terminal which is paid for in loose change (usually used in airports), how are you going to track that person down one month later? What if the terminal is outside the United States?

Not to mention free Linksys brand wireless Internet access which is available in most areas.

Any government fighting terrorists needs to setup its own terrorist propaganda websites which make use of Microsoft Internet Explorer's many vulnerabilities. Spyware for the spies. Microsoft's poor security practices not only hurt you, they also hurt the terrorists. Of course terrorists using Firefox screws us all.

Phone companies do it, after all...

It is nevertheless impractical for ISP's to do the same because there are several orders of magnitude more simultaneous connections than there are with phone companies because phone calls typically last on the order of minutes, while individual IP packets take less than a fraction of a second to transmit and they are done. One could track entire TCP streams, but even those can be over in less than a second, and it wouldn't be helpful for tracking things like UDP or even raw IP. It would require absolutely huge amounts of data storage to chronicle even a single hour's usage in entirety on a major ISP, let alone keeping it around for days or weeks.

"The principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That is the only purpose for which power can be rightfully excersized over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."

• 1) Does spying on everyone's internet use threaten everyone's Liberty to use it?

• 2) What happens when there are 2 people, meaning to harm others, but the only way to know how to prevent that harm is to restrict their "liberty of action" along with everyone else's?

• Doctors to tell politions that everything that is bad for us should be banned and force us to live in a bubble to to stop us from getting sick.
• Armed Forces to say that we should destroy all other nations and force us to live in bunkers to prevent us from getting killed
• Police Force to demand that they can monitor all people at all times in order to stop crime
• Politians to defend our liberty from all of these people, inform you of all of their findings and to impose laws to protect your freedoms not increase security
• You to make sure your elected officials are doing what you and your fellow country men

"They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination" - U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff