So am I. I wrote "fictitious brown persons." to refer to Hollywood-stereotypes, not to offend sensitive people. English is not my first language.

It is valid, but always brought up in a context, where the discussion is not about "who should sell", but "is alcohol bad." This discussion is about Norway serving rye flatbread once a week to their soldiers while their state-owned oil company is selling fossil fuel. I know many pushers and when they start saying: "If it was not me..." they are pressed for arguments.

Never said it wasn't valid :)

None the less - this bad analogy shows how irrational we conceive the world. There is a reason that it is used to make people aware of the threat, because people fear fictitious brown persons overacting in Hollywood-movies more than an abstract scientific risk-calculi. It says more about our ridiculous way of thinking that we need an evil, human face to take a warning serious.

Who said that the pusher wasn't telling the truth? You are just elaborating my point.

The classical pusher-argument. If I didn't sell smack someone way more evil than me would.

The fact that modern democracies have these grey-shaded institutions and make use of them to spy on each other is something that we probably will have to live with, and maybe even appreciate. As long as the targets for the espionage is large centralized power centres, like government, the military or organized, violent groups. In some way I think that we need, as in Iain Banks culrure-books, someone to step in in "special circumstances." Assassination, revolt or similar should of course rather NOT be the job of our intelligence services. Think if MI6 and CIA hadn't instigated a coup in Iran in 1953 against one of the regions first democratic government? How would the middle east have looked today?

But the really big wrong that Snowden has revealed is mass-surveillance of the entire population. This kind of technological spying can only be used for one thing: anti-democratic, cost-heavy practises, targeted against the press, grass-root and the very population that the system was intended to protect.

Why call it Dark-Mail? Grandma should be able to use... Dark Mail? Like she was a Sith-lord. What about PBP Pretty Better Privacy?

When I first saw the Snowden-film from Hong Kong I thought: "damn! he has forfeited his life and nobody will care. And now this! Not only has he shaken the political world-society, he has also aroused the tech-world and made it possible to make some major changes. Hope I will be running this new protocol by next year and be able to send super-secret Christmas-cards to the select few who is also using it!

In Sweden the radical-feminist ideology has made similar intrusions in the free scientific research. This is not an American-only problem. Watch from ca. 1:39:00 or thereabout. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn3cHsHnUPM The program was made by Swedens state television by a Iraqi-Swedish female journalist and she came close to leading Swedish politicians and feminist lobbyists only because of their overly positive PR stance towards women from third-world countries.

Sorry ... more propaganda. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyrTx9SXkVI Sorry for the Enya-choir. Cycling in Copenhagen is not THAT Celtic/whaleish.

This discussion is awfully American and to a Dane like me it seems that most the people posting here (I haven't had the time to read it all) is ignoring that other countries, amongst them my own, has a lot of experience with minimizing the risk of bicycling. It goes without saying that bicycle-riders, like pedestrians, are vulnerable to a moving ton of steel like a car, but for pedestrians you have side-walks. In Denmark a lot of the bicycle lanes are elevated just like a side-walk and this is definitely making it safer to ride in the city. Bicycle-lanes is working for millions of Dutch and Danish bicycle-riders, so I think that the whole discussion is more about culture and the difficulties to adopt new infrastructural concepts than anything else. Footage from Copenhagen : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXw_t172BKY and this is a video posted by another dude further up the posts also from Copenhagen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbXIXQGQVZM