I find it interesting that some readers ahead of me actually posted saying that this article was not on target...

The point is, 50 years ago, there would have at least been protests against this sort of invasion of privacy.

How many of us are truly 100% 'innocent'? Not I. While I've never robbed a bank or trafficked in controlled substances across the 49th parallel, I do use marijuana occasionally, and the OS on this computer did not send any royalties to the software giant that produced it... My semi-educated guess places at least 50% of home users using illegitimate software, and about 70% of my home town has smoked or does smoke pot. Does that mean that the cops will have the right, as well as the means, to bust all of us?

Having something to hide (and most of us do) or not is not the issue. The point is, they can and will dig through any and everything they can to try and prove you are hiding something. The entire system is moving away from 'innocent until proven guilty' and more towards 'guilty until the lawyer can get the case thrown out.'

If you really want to put this argument into perspective, google the 'War on Drugs'; what it's done to huge numbers of relatively harmless people, many of them who committed no crimes, the taxpayer dollars spent on it, and the fact that drugs are easier to get now than ever.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/297/30478#30478