Every breath you take.

I have been spending too may hours reading papers that somehow missed one of the ideas in the introduction of "A Brief History of Time" - that you will lose approximately 50% of your readers for each of the formula included in the writing. I have always been a little suspicious of that claim, but can not really seem to escape that nagging feeling that the number of folks that have dug through this work is a little thin...

In trying to escape my actual work, a number of interesting factoids have wandered into my limited attention span and stuck there. You, gentle reader, can decide for your self if there is any real connection.

We are on the last weeks of the administration run by the Worst President Ever. While they are busy doing last minute run-arounds on consumer rights and trying to hide the most egregious of their deeds, the world as a whole trundles on toward the situation where any notion of your privacy is disappearing. Once it goes away you will never get it back.

Off to the land down under, where in order to help police people against themselves the government will be filtering All internet content:

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government's pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

Under the government's $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material.

Pundits say consumers have been lulled into believing the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether.

The government will iron-out policy and implementation of the Internet content filtering software following an upcoming trial of the technology, according to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

Department spokesman Tim Marshall said the filters will be mandatory for all Australians.

"Labor's plan for cyber-safety will require ISPs to offer a clean feed Internet service to all homes, schools and public Internet points accessible by children," Marshall said.

This plan is so breathtakingly stupid that I am not really sure just how to add to it. The least offensive of the options still provides the "shucks, illegal is illegal" second grade gutless rational.

Pausing for a moment, we head back to the US where ISP's are being pressured to directly monitor users traffic under recently passed legislation which will - you will never guess this one - protect the children.

As reported in msnbc:

But such monitoring just became easier with a law approved unanimously by the Congress and signed on Monday by President Bush. A section of that law written by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain gives Internet service providers access to lists of child porn files, which previously had been closely held by law enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Although the law says it doesn't require any monitoring, it doesn't forbid it either. And the law ratchets up the pressure, making it a felony for ISPs to fail to report any "actual knowledge" of child pornography.

Short version: the ISP looks at the signature of every file that is passed to and from your computer. This signature is created by a third party (or law enforcement) and the ISP has no actual notion of what is in the file. The ISP then blocks the transmission of the file, and reports the IP address and local account information to law enforcement. At this point we can assume that the already in place no-knock FBI team can then come in to your home, accuse you publicly of a henious crime and take away all your possessions. Guess they forgot to mention that in the article.

How does the company defend it's product?

A spokesman for Brilliant Digital Entertainment disputed that, saying the technology would be "non-invasive," would not compromise privacy, would be legal in the U.S. and elsewhere, and most important, would curtail the global proliferation of child pornography.

"I don't think it takes many voices before the Internet industry separates out those who are prepared to build a business on the trafficking of child sexual exploitation," said Michael Speck, Brilliant Digital's commercial manager in charge of law enforcement products. "If boxes started turning up with Pablo Escobar's special-delivery cocaine inside, they'd stop it, they'd do something about it."

The mind boggles.

In doing what I do for a living, there is an expectation that general principles of what an ISP is legally allowed to do. At least in California, I would guess that this would be allowed if law enforcement (or any other government funded institution) is not involved such dragnet activity (without per-person warrent). This is of course ignoring all of the moral aspects of this technology.

For the record it would be trivial to avoid this technology as it is reminiscent of antivirus software in the late 1990s. This is hardly a ringing enforcement.

There was another entry about the NSA hoovering up yet more data - phone calls, email, network traffic - but really if you think that that is not happening now there are larger problems.

The destruction of our personal privacy will not take place via some great momentous declaration with tanks in the street. It will be digested one tiny bit at a time. For our own good and yes, for the children.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

(for the whole thing see this)

I hope that a change in government will begin to undo all this madness.