Police State or 'Cyberapocalypse' - the culture of paranoia gets even stranger.

Sometimes those of us living north of the 49th look to the south and shake our heads. We live in paranoid times, the myth of Western invincibility shattered forever by 9/11. It certainly doesn't improve the situation when the head of the National Security Agency goes completely off his trolly. And how...

Michael McConnell proposed in an article in the New Yorker that the NSA needs to start monitoring all US internet traffic to prevent a massive attack on the country's data infrastructure worse than the most dire Y2K predictions. Wow. So the trade off of personal freedoms for (the illusion of) security now becomes an irrevocable choice between living in a police state or facing a post-apocalyptic future. How can anyone in a supposedly democratic country even propose such as thing and be taken the least bit seriously?

Julian Sanchez of Ars Technica gives us the voice of reason, pointing out that you should at least need a warrant to monitor every single bit of even one users internet traffic.

Now, Canada being so close to the US I wouldn't be surprised if much of our internet traffic goes to or at least through the US. Listen folks, your government doesn't even have the right to to this to you, let alone citizens of other countries. I hope that you won't go quietly, and we Canadian have no interest in being dragged down with you.