If the FCC is laughable, the Attorney General is downright scary. I used to call Ashcroft "Gruppenfuhrer" but Gonzales is starting to make his predecessors look like pikers.

Invoking the terrorist bogeyman, our latest Gruppenfuhrer has apparently secretly informed ISPs and maybe search engines that they are required (by what law, one wonders) to retain all records of user activity for two years. Initially, this push for universal net surveillance was draped in the cloak of "protecting the children." That's always a convenient hook on which to hang intrusions because, hey, who's going to stand up and say they're in favor of more rights for child molesters? But that's just a ruse, a shell game. This kind of regulation has nothing to do with kiddie porn. It has to do with this government's insatiable hunger for spying on its own people.

Apparently, even China doesn't retain this much information on its citizens but this is the YEW-ESS-AYE and we have to do everything bigger here than anywhere else. So when we screw up it can be a screwup of truly monumental proportions.

Now excuse me, there's someone knocking on my door - I'll just go see who it is...