Big Brother gets Bigger

It turns out that they're not only listening to our phone calls now, they're also reading our mail.

All of this brings to mind a very good Arabic friend of mine who used to live here in America, but has returned now to his home in an Arabic country in North Africa. Since his return, I have been quite wary of discussing politics (either those of his country or of ours) by phone, e-mail, or snail mail, since I knew that his country had a habit of intercepting communications and trying people arbitrarily as traitors for even the slightest provocations.

Now, I hesitate to communicate with him for the additional fear that our own country might intercept those messages and decide to prevent him from obtaining a visa to return here.

It's not that anything in the communications would be damming or threatening to the U.S. It's that they might decide he doesn't like Bush (which he doesn't).

The invasiveness of this government scrutiny is really getting scary. Today's Washington Post has a story of how the U.K. will soon have the capability of tracking every vehicle in the country on a real-time basis. We're soon going to need "stealth" cars to prevent the government from knowing where we are.