Books will be more exhaustively tracked than guns. Think about it. Do we need the equivalent of the second amendment for books? Does everyone have the right to keep and bear books? NRA would be happy to tell you the next step after registration is confiscation. Since books will come to you essentially pre-registered, ready to help catalog the thoughts in your head, we can CLEARLY see what the Powers That Be in the world think is more dangerous.

Miasma

Convicted? Need a Gun? No Problem. Thousands of individuals who aren't legally permitted to buy firearms are purchasing them with little effort, despite a system of background checks that's supposed to stop them. By Lia Steakley. [Wired News]

1:01:23 AM    

From New York City to Seattle, police officials are looking to do away with rules that block them from spying on people and groups without evidence that a crime has been committed.

[ ... ]

But just as the effort was wrapping up in July, the F.B.I. ran into a two-man revolt. The owners of the Reef Seekers Dive Company in Beverly Hills, Calif., balked at turning over the records of their clients, who include Tom Cruise and Tommy Lee Jones -- even when officials came back with a subpoena asking for "any and all documents and other records relating to all noncertified divers and referrals from July 1, 1999, through July 16, 2002."

Faced with defending the request before a judge, the prosecutor handling the matter notified Reef Seekers' lawyer that he was withdrawing the subpoena. The company's records stayed put.

"We're just a small business trying to make a living, and I do not relish the idea of standing up against the F.B.I.," said Ken Kurtis, one of the owners of Reef Seekers. "But I think somebody's got to do it."

In this case, the government took a tiny step back. But across the country, sometimes to the dismay of civil libertarians, law enforcement officials are maneuvering to seize the information-gathering weapons they say they desperately need to thwart terrorist attacks.

[ ... ]

Still, civil libertarians increasingly worry about how law enforcement might wield its new powers. They say the nation is putting at risk the very thing it is fighting for: the personal freedoms and rights embodied in the Constitution. Moreover, they say, authorities with powerful technology will inevitably blunder, as became evident in October when an audit revealed that the Navy had lost nearly two dozen computers authorized to process classified information.

What perhaps angers the privacy advocates most is that so much of this revolution in police work is taking place in secret, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented Reef Seekers.

"If we are going to decide as a country that because of our worry about terrorism that we are willing to give up our basic privacy, we need an open and full debate on whether we want to make such a fundamental change," Ms. Cohn said.

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