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Bees, anyone?
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"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote: "Billy" wrote in message "FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote: "Billy" wrote in message news:wildbilly- "FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote: "Nad R" wrote in message During 911 every grocery store had to give the names of everyone that purchased humus, an arabic food, the grocery stores complied. Excuse my scepticism, but are you pulling our collective legs? I know the US does some unbelievable daft things in the name of security, but having to give one's name in order to buy humus is just so incedibly silly, that I find it hard to believe. Can you provide a cite for that? The large stores here will give you a small discount on your grocery purchases, if you have a card from their store. The card is bar coded and directs the purchases of your sale to your own personal database. The database is of course for sale, so that when someone decides to sell widgets, there is a data base of previous widget buyers, and advertiser can aim their advertising at you. I don't use them, Admiral Poindexter can find out about me the hard way. Yes, I understand that, however do you have a (semi-)reputable cite about the humus buyers? I know that information from buying activites can be collected and analysed and that there may be some value in trying to identify people by purchases, but the commitment of resources to such a potentially futile exercise is probably beyond the tolerance for wastage of even a profligate administration. I also think that it would be unlikely that human resources with sufficient sense would be available to do such a job even if the funding was there. It's low level work but requires competent analytical skills. You know how few people there are who post on usenet who can read a sentence and analyse a few simple clauses in order to understand what's been said. If the bulk of usenet posters is in any way representative of the pool of talent in the general poupulace such a project would be very dangerous to try to conduct. It'd be a nightmare to oversight even if it did happen and I still have doubts that it did happen. There should be some sniff online if it did take place because there are implications of racial profiling and the potential for claims of victimisation based on purchasing. It'd be a minefiled and something that would be hard to hide and perhaps even more so in an environment of constant conspiracy theories. It is symptomatic of our environment. Nobody knows if it's true, but it sounds like our government. They spied on us illegally, and then, retroactively passed a law that said it was OK. And you know about that because......................? If all that came out, do you really think the humus buying spying wouldn't have? I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person but I also like to differntiate between reality and speculation. There is still no cite (other than gossip) to support the humus spying story. You seem to have an honest government, at least your Prime Minister seems decent, but here and in Europe, there has been a shift to the right since Bush. If your computer has a web cam, I'd cover its lens when it wasn't in use. The neighborhood has changed. I agree that the western world has moved very far right since 9/11. But that does not mean that the minions of the right are any more effective than minions of the left or minions of the in betweeners. There does seem to be more money for corporate sponsored, right-wing minions than there is for status quo or left-wing minions, but then there is that market share thing, where controlling a big share of a small market may be better than owning a small share of a big market. The world seems full of Elmer Gantrys/Tartuffes, but I have faith that most people are good, and just want to hang-out with friends and families instead of chasing after power. I still have a security clearance from my government (as I still do casual work for them) and I know that most bureaucracies are largely ineffective and we've already got examples of that. 9/11 happened despite the enormous resources the US puts into security. A low level military guy in Iraq steals and expose State Department cables. If you and Nad expect me to believe there is some degree of competence in spooking on humus buyers then one or other of you are going to have to come up with better proof than usenet gossip. Don't look at me. This is the first that I heard about it. My only point is that most people won't be surprised if our government had used some form of profiling to spy on us. -- - Billy "When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist." -Archbishop Helder Camara http://peace.mennolink.org/articles/...acegroups.html http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth...130964689.html |
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