STALKING'S JUST FOR GOVERNMENT NOW.Byline: Tina Dupuy Local View I was a stalker before it was illegal. Yep, that's right. For those of you who don't remember because you aren't old enough or you've never been persistent enough with a love interest, stalking laws were passed in California in 1990. Much like smoking bans and strip malls, they then quickly spread across the country. The object of my obsession was an older guy. I was 12 and awkward. He was 16 and annoyed. I went out of my way to pass by his house. He went out of his way to be cruel so that I would leave him alone. I wrote his name on my Trapper Keeper
A Trapper Keeper is a brand of loose-leaf binder created by Mead. Popular with students of all grades in the United States and parts of Latin America from the 1970s to the 1990s, hundreds of times. He high-tailed his BMX BMX abbr. bicycle motocross BMX Noun 1. bicycle motocross: stunt riding over an obstacle course on a bicycle 2. in the opposite direction when he saw me. But those were the good old days of being tenacious te·na·cious adj. 1. Clinging to another object or surface; adhesive. 2. Holding together firmly; cohesive. tenacious viscid; adhesive. . Now the cops get involved pretty quickly. It's really taken all the fun out of it. No, now you can't stalk someone you love. It's only big soulless soul·less adj. Lacking sensitivity or the capacity for deep feeling. soul  less·ly adv. corporations and the Bush administration that get to do that.
One day I woke up and the line between ``paranoid'' and ``pretty sure'' had been blurred. Take spyware for example. There are tons of bugs and ``cookies'' that companies use to see where you're going and what you are doing online. I'm outraged that these companies find out how truly boring I am. The fact that I spend the majority of my time online trolling (1) Surfing, or browsing, the Web. (2) Posting derogatory messages about sensitive subjects on newsgroups and chat rooms to bait users into responding. (3) Hanging around in a chat room without saying anything, like a "peeping tom." myspace and pretending to read the BBC BBC in full British Broadcasting Corp. Publicly financed broadcasting system in Britain. A private company at its founding in 1922, it was replaced by a public corporation under royal charter in 1927. news site is none of anyone's business. I have the right to keep those things private and to announce them in humorously self-exploitive articles as I see fit. This is extremely valuable information that results in target marketing. And if your privacy is valuable to you, it's as equally outrageous. No, hacking isn't just for precocious pre·co·cious adj. Showing unusually early development or maturity. pre·coc ity , pre·co tweens anymore. Now you
have to battle corporations, too. I currently have three (count them
three) anti-spyware programs running on my PC. Even with FireFox and
firewalls, I still end up with more spyware on my machine than the total
number of DeLay indictments and Abramoff bribe recipients combined!
In the middle of the War on Christmas it was leaked that the Bush administration has been spying on us without a warrant. I say ``us'' because we don't really know who it is. It could be any of us. It could be me, because I pretend to read the BBC news site everyday. They hate us for our freedoms? We're striving for popularity! Back in the good old days, only celebrities had to fight for their privacy. They were heavily compensated by movie deals, book deals and the free meals one gets when one is famous (or so I have heard). Mobsters Mobsters is a 1991 crime drama detailing the creation of the National Crime Syndicate/The Commission. Set in New York City during the Prohibition era, it's a somewhat fictionalized account of rise of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Benjamin "Bugsy" and drug dealers were the ones constantly worried about being bugged. Only consumers who signed up for a club card got tracked by businesses. Now we are all subjected to these disclosures. And we don't get any of the benefits like being famous, having the tax-free income tax-free income The income received but not subject to income taxes. For example, interest from most municipal bonds is free of federal income taxes and often from state and local income taxes as well. Compare tax-deferred income, tax-sheltered income. of a drug dealer or getting in-store discounts. The one thing I know about civil rights is that if you don't assert them, you may as well not have them. Our current president passed an anti-spam law, the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003) A U.S. statute effective January 1, 2004 that allows spammers to be fined up to $6 million. Act of 2003. He and the 108th Congress touted the Do Not Call List to prove they cared about Americans' dinner being interrupted. I know this because I got a SPAM e-mail about putting my name on the Do Not Call List. And as of the beginning of this year, it is illegal to anonymously annoy someone on the Internet. But as far as the right to unwarranted searches? It's a technicality. Think of George W. Bush as the ``let them eat cake'' leader of privacy issues. In the last 15 years, the Years, The the seven decades of Eleanor Pargiter’s life. [Br. Lit.: Benét, 1109] See : Time amount of legislation devoted solely to keeping our private affairs private has been vast. It's the one bipartisan issue we can all agree upon. We like having the freedom not to be watched by the government, crazed suitors or private industry. But now the system we expect to help us combat these violations has become the biggest violator. In a war for freedom, this battle has been lost. |
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