Pug’s Place

Hurray. Let’s all get our patriotic shirts and hats out. The juiciest parts of the Patriot II act have just been passed (last Friday) in secret by being tacked onto an intelligence spending bill, the sort that gets no public comment due to ’security issues.’ Here’s Slashdot’s story with comments and Wired News’. Excuse me a moment…

GOD DAMN IT!

Okay, so we’ve expanded the secret unaccountable investigative powers of our soon-to-be police state. Measures have been and are still in the works to pass “super-DMCA” bills that would make file sharing illegal [Text of the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003 (eff.org)]. Since 60 million Americans use peer to peer file sharing and that’s 10 million more than voted for President Bush, you start to realize that slowly but surely, the guys in the Department of Homeland Security who are simply ‘Preserving Life and Liberty’ are slowly making every US citizen a felon, be it by music-sharing or, simply playing legally-purchased DVDs on Linux. Add that together with the fact that these people are capable of spying on you without needing any reason and we start to see that all of this is adding together to give the government the power to jail any member of its citizenry who steps out of line.

Will that happen? Probably not in the near future, but not all regimes have the same moral standards.

I can see a future need to be 21 so that I can start exercising my 2nd Amendment rights and purchase handguns.

Please, someone recommend to me a different country. One that doesn’t follow the U.S.’s lead blindly.