SPOA/PIPA, again -- even worse

[Lester Curtis]

They're t it again . . .

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/c ... ou-stop-it

[Robert_Moriyama]

The hell of it is, they introduced something very similar (some say it's WORSE) in Canada, and hardly anyone has raised much fuss about it. The Canadian government is pursuing policies modeled on stuff that even Texas has admitted is a bad idea, so it should be no surprise that they would want to do something like this, too. Corporations have rights (especially banks and oil companies), especially to privacy and security; people, on the other hand, have rights only so long as they are not "terrorists" and / or doing something that a corporation doesn't like.

[Robert_Moriyama]

There is a story here, gentlemen; futuristic society; controling the masses; mark of the beast and all that! Things to motivate and inspire anyone out of a writer's block or lethargic creative slump!

Yeah, but it wouldn't qualify as science fiction. It would have to run as a non-fiction feature! (Unless there was a vampire or alien behind the nefarious plot...)

RM

[Lester Curtis]

Those ideas have been done, Mark, but nobody says they can't be recycled.

I take it you've been reading Seanan's article . . . ?

[Robert_Moriyama]

Humm, I don't know; digital implants required to tag every citizen of the globe. Cyber manhunts to find "criminals" who didn't obey the World Government Council. Implants deaden creative impulses; revolt by an underground resistance (you always have to have an underground resistance), set up clinics to remove implants, thereby removing control by the New World Order?

Mark

Already here, Mark. They're called SmartPhones.

(See how sexy they can make Digital Implants? Oh, minor detail, they're in your pocket and not your arm, but do you purposely leave home without your smartphone?)

If you've never seen it, find a copy of the old James Coburn spy spoof movie "The President's Analyst". The evil super-organization turns out to be TPC -- The Phone Company (this was back before the forced breakup of the monolithic proto-megacorporation). And they wanted to have phone chips implanted at birth...

(Coburn plays a psychiatrist who is drafted to be the President's analyst. He becomes the target for every spy agency on Earth, because he hears things that are beyond top secret... At the end, he takes arms against the aforementioned TPC, and as he blasts away with a machine gun, he snarls

"Take that, you hostile son of a bitch!"

(Once a psychiatrist, always a psychiatrist...)