Re: If all you do is sit on the couch at night.
@Hud Dunlap
'Couch potatoes' might not be a threat but easy targets are always of interest to those looking to 'crack down' or 'get tough'.
Whatever the line now, the uses that surveillance is put to inevitably widens over time.
In Australia we have already seen in a very short space of time the language change from surveillance measures being there to stop terrorism to being an 'essential crime fighting tool'.
Any time there's a beat up in the news about some minor celebrity being insulted on Twitter or Facebook (or whatever), Government ministers come out talking about the need to crack down on 'online trolls'. Think they won't use dragnet surveillance to do that?
Or the next time the Government sees itself facing a controversy of their own making, as is de rigueur in Australia, does anyone really believe they won't use their new powers to identify some group to target.
In Queensland recently, the Premier - facing backlashes from numerous unpopular measures - implemented the VLAD act which more or less makes it a criminal offence to look at a motorcycle. In just its first few weeks, there were several arrests and raids that made the papers nationally highlighting innocent people being treated like criminals.
In one instance, a lady was arrested and was facing 6 months in jail for being in a pub with her partner and his friend who were both members of a motorcycle gang that, for whatever reason and by whatever criteria, the Government had deemed a criminal organisation, or, in spin-speak, a 'Vicious Lawless Association' (from whence VLAD comes).
How was this woman identified? CCTV in the bar in question. Does anyone really believe online surveillance laws wouldn't be used for such crack downs? Keep in mind the best data available shows bikies involved in less that 0.8% of crime in QLD.
But that's really just one example and the truth is that such things can, do, and will happen.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
