[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by nmap

I don't question that some would like to monitor everyone and everything - but I can't see how it could get done.

nmap--

With respect, I would argue that this project is already well under way.

• If you have a gmail account, take a look at the advertisements that appear around a given email. The ads will be related to the text in that message.
• If you have a DVR, the recommended programs that are recorded for you come from software tracking your viewing habits.
• If you have an amazon.com account, your browsing and shopping history, as well as the contents of your shopping cart, will generate recommendations for future purchases.
• If you use stumbleupon regularly, topics for future stumbling will come from your clicking and your voting.
• When you use Youtube, your viewing patterns are correlated with the patterns of like minded end users to generate suggestions.
• If you use free software 'plug ins' like Xobni, or desktop search engines, you can get on the fly search results from your computer.
• If you use an internet-based search engine like Google, you can find almost anything if you have the right four word search string in less than a minute. (Even a software engineer in South Korea with one of that country's most common family names, Kim.)

Today's software and computers are so robust that these tasks are performed without significant effort.

Originally Posted by 6.8SPC_DUMP

The closest I found to a comparable historical reference was The Sedition Act in 1798. This act was used to imprison Republican party members and shut down their newspapers because they opposed the Federalist party. The act was repelled, and all rulings reversed, when the Republican party won the next election (in part due to outrage over this violation of the 1st Amendment). <<SNIP>>

Two minor but historiographically significant points. The Alien and Sedition Acts were aimed at the Democratic-Republicans, not the Republicans. The Republican Party was founded in 1854. Second, I'm of the view that the Alien and Sedition Acts should be viewed within the context of the conflict between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans over how the United States should approach the rivalry between Great Britain and France, especially given the ominous implications of the French Revolution.* Centuries later, we have become a bit disconnected from the widely held contemporaneous understanding that revolutions were really big deals.**

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* A brief discussion of this period can be found in George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S Foreign Relations Since 1776, vol XI of The Oxford History of the United States, ed. David M. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 67-101.
** Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993).