This is the challenge our generation faces. How can you avoid creating a police state in an environment litered with terrorists and murderers and child abusers when omnipotent technology is at hand and it can help fight them? Is it even possible?

Your concerns are valid. But "an environment litered with terrorists and murderers and child abusers"? Really? Take a look out your window. Where are all these people? Social paranoia, fed by the tabloid media hungry for scraps of news, encouraged by agencies of control, is a dangerous state of mind. "The monster under the bed is coming to get you! Come to Daddy's arms ... "

We need to assess the level of risk - and that means not listening uncritically to agencies who gain most from maximizing those risks. We do this every day. Whenever we get in a car we are implicitly using risk assessment as a means to balance the - not inconsiderable - risk over loss of freedom. And the idea that all risks can and should be removed is a nonsense in civil liberties as it is in security or audit or everyday life.

What do you think the chances are of dying quietly at home in an domestic accident against being killed by all these imaginary legions of terrorists, murderers or child abusers?

Of course, your concerns are valid. But don't lose your freedom to the Bogey Man.

RE: Its not about the surveillance...