Needles and Haystacks

I remain to be convinced that all the hysteria over national governments being able to spy on people's emails and internet habits - is in any way justified.

Certainly in any country where a modern democracy exists and there is respect for the rule of law which - for all its faults - is what we have in the UK. 

The key point for me is that while a government or national security agency might have the ability to spy on me - what evidence exists to show that they are abusing this power - by using it randomly over perfectly innocent citizens?

None, as far as I can see - apart from some geeky ex-spy (Eric Snowden) turning up in far flung Hong Kong to announce like Private Fraser in Dad's Army that - 'Were all doomed!'.  

Yet Eric, as far as I'm aware, didn't come up with a single example of where this power had been abused - whereas there are obvious reasons for having the ability to read or listen into other people's conversations - which has been going on since the days of Al Capone, for goodness sake.

Needless to say Eric the spy has been welcomed as a hero by every consipracy theorist on the planet - including Julian Assange who is now holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in a desperate attempt to resist deportation to Sweden - where he faces accusations of sexual assault from two separate women.

Now Assange and his Wikileaks organisation did a good thing - up to a point - because initially they exposed wrongdoing within the US Armed Forces which would otherwise have remained covered up. 

But Wikileaks and the increasingly paranoid Assange then made their big mistake - by releasing every single piece of 'confidential' information involving the US government - without trying to distinguish between possible wrongdoing and other perfectly sensible information that was being used to apprehend suspected terrorists. 

In other words, Assange threw the baby out with the bathwater and made himself look as though he had an agenda - a personal agenda or a political one, who knows - but certainly an anti-western, anti-American agenda which has now swollen to include the UK and Sweden although not Ecuador, for obvious reasons.

The spooks on the internet I hate most are the ones responsible for all these viruses and scams that appear on my computers from time to time - but I'm pretty sure the UK government or any other government is not responsible for all the hassle that causes.

The best comment I heard on the subject came from some chap on the radio who used the analogy of looking for a needle in a haystack - when it comes to hunting for suspected terrorists.

He said something along the lines of 'if the bad guys are the needle, the only way to find them is to search through the entire haystack'.

Now that made perfect sense to me, so I still sleep soundly at night despite what the conspiracy theorists have to say - because the truth is guys like Assange will never be satisfied until they rule the world.