It's been a while since I had a chance to sit down and rant about anything in the news.  I've been a touch busy, what with the economy imploding, trying to keep my day job, and working in another country for a couple months.  But enough about me and my hiatus.  On to more important things.
 
Here's one I just read about today: "Prison Officer Sacked After Befriending Inmates on Facebook."
 
My friends and coworkers have commented to me that I rarely have anything good to say about anything, and that assessment is pretty accurate.  I usually say to them that I used to be an optimist, but then I started paying attention.  In this case, though, I actually have something positive to say.  My simultaneous first thoughts when I read the above headline were "GOOD!" and "Wait just a fucking minute...they get Facebook in prison?" 
Not that I give the tiniest of shits about Facebook personally, but I can't even get there from work, nor can I check my gmail account or view most message boards and forums.  Why the hell do convicted criminals have access to the Internet?

Arse-puckering news out of the U.K. recently. Noteworthy articles can be found (here) and (here). In a nutshell, there are plans in the works to allow government and law enforcement entities to collect, catalog, and monitor personal information from various internet services including instant messaging, gaming, and social networking sites. It should come as no surprise that the idea of someone looking over their shoulder the whole time they're online pisses a lot of people off, but this isn't the only reason to worry about this kind of surveillance.

Now I'm not saying that it's not important, but I'm going to try to sidestep the whole George Orwell/1984/Big Brother side of the discussion. Issues of privacy as a fundamental right are absolutely important, but the first thing anyone ever points out is that this kind on monitoring of the public is a slippery slope into an Orwellian dystopia. So for shits and giggles (and a brief thought experiment) let's assume that your government loves you, terrorists really are using Facebook to plot global annihilation, and this proposed project has nothing to do with targeting legitimate political dissent and freedom of speech. Warm and fuzzy? Off we go...