== Behold! The Bliss Watch List = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

To hell with the FBI's million-strong Terrorist Watch List. Here is your killer alternative

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/31/notes103107.DTL&nl=fix

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center which is naturally connected by a series of secret, rotting, subterranean vacuum tunnels to the National Security Agency and the Homeland Security Department and Dick Cheney's nipple-torture fetish room, is a vicious little computer bank running an encephalitic version of Microsoft Vista that's right now churning through some sort of satanic algorithm designed to mine enormous piles of chaotic data from a million unreliable global sources, all in an effort to add tens of thousands more names to the U.S. government's specious and hugely flawed master terrorist watch list and oh my God look at that, 500 more were just added in the time it took you to read this fantastic little sentence. What a thing.

Ah yes, the U.S. terrorist watch list. Are you on it? Is your sister? Are you sure? Because there are, apparently, already upwards of 800,000 names in the database so far, fast approaching a million, so many names of so many people from so many different countries (and yes, rest assured, many are U.S. citizens) all stacked together in such a frightening, funny-if-it-wasn't-so-goddamn-draconian secret government file it makes you cringe and shudder and feel just a bit ashamed to be an American — or rather, make that more ashamed. You know, considering.

In fact, if my rough estimates are accurate, at the current ridiculous rate of growth, the terrorist watch list will hold roughly 87 billion names by, say, your next birthday. It will soon list every single person on the face of the planet, along with all dead people, the unborn three generations out, and (strangely) many plants. It is just that insidious. It is just that absurd and obscene and just that much of a hint of the nasty surveillance state we are quietly, viciously becoming.

Perhaps you missed this story. Perhaps you skipped right by the fact that the database added 700,000 new names (maybe your kids!) in the past three years, 100,000 in the past five months alone. It's OK. You were probably too sickened by the fact that Dubya has just demanded another $46 billion from Congress to add to the previous $140 billion, all so that he may even more brutally lose the Iraq war. ...

[madokie]

1. one kick by me

:kick: