And for those of us who weren't feeling our lives quite sufficiently dissected, folded, spindled, and mutilated, the (lengthly) article linked below should hike the stomach acid factor!

Quoting the lead paragraph:

"A day in the life of the ordinary American citizen is greatly different from that of a citizen of any other nation. From the moment he arises till the moment he retires, he is the subject of constant computer-driven surveillance."

One of the few good things that I could find in that monster article was that all attourneys and attourney-wannabe's are forever enshrined in their own special database. Of course, I'm sure Hillary found that helpful!

Are U.S. citizens unique? No. I'm sure our Aussie readers will concur, as will our Brit readers.

Now, one wonders what percentage of all of those databases contains accidentally or deliberately-inaccurate information. One also wonders about the y2k compliance of especially those databases that are linked to others. The h&*( one does! Uhhhhh...

OK, OK, I promise to try to stay more on-topic with my posts. Just couldn't resist this one!

"The Surveilled American"

-- Redeye in Ohio (cannot@work.com), February 09, 2000

Answers

You got that deliberately inaccurate info part right! I work in a government environment and have witnessed more than one incident where paperwork was "lost", held or entered in "malicious" error. The interesting question is how many unintended targets will be hit with the expanded relational data bases interacting on multiple levels on bad data. Yeah, for now this is OT, but a couple of months ago so were hackers. Off duty now, so can post.

-- another government hack (keepwatching_2000@yahoo.com), February 09, 2000.