... that it was a news organization, the supposed "watch dogs" of potential government oppression who mention this database of anti-depressant users without even a hint of concern about how this information might be misused by the government or whether maintaining it might violate the law.

Did they forget the watergate break in of a psychiatrist's office to gather confidential information about a potential political rival?

I'm not the DT who tipped Glenn off, but I read this yesterday and was stunned to hear about its existence and also to hear that such a program isn't even shocking to most people anymore. We are indeed being boiled slowly and most people don't even notice.

That we are watched is really not the point. That the name of our crime is carved on our backs until we die, is a bigger deal. We could live as if everything is, for better or worse an open book. We assume that already. Or should. The critical point though is that we will be punished for it. Not accidentally, but intentionally. My bank screwed up a coupon 'accidentally'. Of course it did. Now because of that one strike, which is their fault, my next loan will have a higher interest rate. I was on a no fly list at one point. Of course it was a technical glitch. Now I am on a whole bunch of other lists that flow from that one 'mistake' automatically. I have health problems and of course the PPO 'accidentally' released that information. Now I am essentially ineligible for insurance from anyone else and anything resembling an affordable price. My name is similar to a well know criminal. Of course that's just a clerical mix up. Now I will flunk every Federal security vetting I ever go for. There's nothing you can do, no one to blame, it's just the way our service economy works. Ooopsie daisy!!!

Paul in KY: I'm sure your friend was thinking of the RSA algorithm, which is difficult to crack because it is difficult to find the prime factors of numbers when the primes are very large. This does not really depend on the problem of "how large of primes can you generate", but it is dependent primarily on the state-of-the-art of the "number field sieve" algorithms.

Here's a message from Bruce Schneier back in 1995:

http://www.sattlers.org/mickey/tech/privacy/topics/pgp/factoring.html

Now, if we increase the key length, the difficulty to crack the message grows exponentially with key length, barring some new secret algorithm that beats the generalized NFS. So theoretically, you can always beat faster factoring algorithms because they can't continually improve exponentially in speed, but the practical issue is whether anyone can crack RSA (and related algos) keys currently in use.

There is a current ad campaign on mtvU for the site "half of us", www.halfofus.com, for which the namesake statistic warns us that half of all college students get so depressed at times they cannot function. Ok, now they know how to get treatment. Do the PreCogs ( as in minority report ) in the government know how to go out and defend universities from "that half" of their students? The database is a useless, after the fact exercise into invasion of peoples right to privacy. It is designed to be a political tool to track and harass political opponents and nothing else.

When something was as awful as 9/11, you can compare anything favorably with it!

Myself, I'd have offered:

"Better habeas corpus than another 9/11"

"Better no GWOT than another 9/11"

"Better human rights than another 9/11"

"Better no torture than another 9/11"

"Better more sousveillance than another 9/11"

"Mo' Better Blues than another 9/11"

...whereas the neocons are giving us:

"Better North American Union than another 9/11"

"Better live in chains than another 9/11"

"Better to be a slave than another 9/11"

"Better dead Iraqis than another 9/11"

"Better no Constitution than another 9/11"

"Better phone, library, internet taps than another 9/11"

"Better internment camps than another 9/11"

"Better secret prisons than another 9/11"

"Better Diebold vote fraud than another 9/11"

"Better mercenaries in your town than another 9/11"

"Better Big Brother than another 9/11"

"Better Republic of Gilead than another 9/11"

"Better not bitch about any of it, either"

Actually, you don't have to look to the government to find mega Prime number crunching-- just go to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search page(www.mersenne.org) to see people with their own computers search for mammoth prime numbers.

Distributed computing, of which this is just one sample is used to find compounds that will combat the HIV virus, and find new antibiotics.

More to the point-- if this were what the government was doing, I would not be too concerned-- it's the data mining, and illegal collection of information ( think TSA) that has me worried.

Duffolonious, thank you for responding to the point I raised a few pages ago.

Appreciate your insight in this matter.

There is word that Dennis Kucinich will introduce articles of impeachment against Cheney.

I wish he would go after the boy king as well.

AFAIK, not quite. With modern day encryption, knowing all the prime numbers to X size is largely beside the point - that's the whole point of one-way hashing - it's hard to reverse engineer. I believe they usually brute force attack the encryption with raw computing power. And this is expensive. Which is why France, for example, requires you to register your private key with the state.

There are a lot of other variables involved depending on the cryptographic algorithm - of which there are many. Some have various weaknesses. WEP encryption for wireless 802.11 protocol is purportedly able to be broken in minutes.

Really an excellent point - the most secretive administration ever is also the most prying and snooping. As you point out, that is exactly backwards.

Generally when someone is overly suspicious of others, it's a big red flag that they are the ones up to no good. A textbook example of classic authoritarian behavior.

The fascists who are expanding the Suveillance State are NOT conservatives. They are authoritarians.

Here's why the names are important.

Although moderate and independent and even conservative Americans are turning away in disgust from "Bushies" and "neocons" and even "Republicans," the label "conservative" still garners respect in this country.

If you ask a non-liberal American (still the majority) if "conservatives" have the country's best interests at heart - without specifying their policies - that American will answer "of course."

But if you ask that same American if an "authoritarian" should be an elected official of this country, she will draw back in horror and probably spit on you.

Calling the undemocratic authoritarians of this maladministration "conservative" not only impugns an honorable American tradition, but more importantly it lends a cloak of respectability to to criminals who are destroying everything this country stands for.

Call them what they are: authoritarians. NOT conservatives.