re: #412 Killgore Trout

Attn: Paranoids
If the government wants to spy on you you’ll never know about it. If they want to round you up into camps the plan isn’t going to be advertised on blogs. If they wanted to execute your grandma they’d kidnap her, take her to Pah-kee-stahn with a bunch of other old people and hit them with a missile under the guise of and octogenarian Al Qaeda cell instead of passing a crappy bill with the words “Kill Granny” in it.

I for one don’t see the “fink on your email chain” invitation as some effort to gather up email addresses with which Obama will build a spy database.

The intended effect, in my opinion, is much more corrosive than a secret police. Living in a society where your friends and neighbors may report your activities to partisan commisars is what this moves us towards. Obama has no problem relying on intimidation to silence his critics - a Chicago tactic he used in the wards there.

This is about (as is the PR offensive of the democrats to “expose” the critics of health care reform) intimidating the opposition into submission. Hugo Chavez used it against his critics in the early days and when they finally got around to protesting it he shut down all opposing media. Using different tactics, Putin has eliminated public criticism from the public sphere.

Is all of that around the corner? No. But I’d rather not allow us to have, as standard practice in American politics, those in power asking partisans to collect and submit data on policy opponents to government funded computer systems.

What would the founders think?